Note: All images and audios are below the person or event to which they refer.
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- May 1, 1751 – Judith Sargent Murray born, poet, playwright, essayist, and pioneering women’s rights advocate; known for her essay “On the Equality of the Sexes” written in 1779, but published in 1790 in Massachusetts Magazine, two years before Mary Wollstonecraft’s more famous Vindication of the Rights of Women. No formal education being available to women, she took advantage of her family’s extensive library to teach herself history, philosophy, geography, and literature. At age 9, she began writing poetry. At age 18, she married John Stevens, a ship’s captain in 1769. During the American Revolution, shipping suffered, and Captain Stevens faced debtor’s prison by the end of the war. She published under a pen name to help end their financial troubles, but her husband fled to the West Indies, where he died in 1768. Two years later, she married John Murray, a Unitarian-Universalist minister. During her travels with him, she met George and Martha Washington, and Benjamin Franklin. At age 38, Murray gave birth to her first child, but her son only lived a few hours. In 1791, now 40 years old, she safely delivered her daughter, Julia Marie. She built a literary life, using pen names like “Honora,” “Martesia” and “Constantia.” In 1792, she assumed a male identity as “The Gleaner” and wrote a column for the Massachusetts Magazine. The family moved to Boston in 1793, where her play, The Medium, was probably the first play by an American author to be produced on the stage. In her columns and essays, she advanced the idea of “Republican Motherhood,” arguing that the new nation required intelligent and virtuous citizens, and since early education of patriotic sons (future voters) rested with mothers, females should also be educated. She challenged the era’s prevailing idea that the female brain was inherently inferior, asserting that women were stifled not by any inherent dearth of intelligence, but by lack of access to education. Murray educated her daughter at home until she was old enough to attend an academy. Income from her writing kept the family solvent. In 1798, she published a collection of “The Gleaner” columns as a book, recruiting 800 presale “subscribers” and garnering endorsements by President George Washington and Vice President John Adams. After her husband died, Murray lived with her married daughter in the frontier town of Natchez, Mississippi, where she died in 1820. Her letter books were discovered in Natchez 164 years later, and published in 2011 as First Lady of Letters: Judith Sargent Murray and the Struggle for Female Independence by University of Pennsylvania Press.
- May 1, 1775 – Sophia Giustina Corri Dussek born, Scottish singer, keyboardist, harpist, and composer, born of Italian parents. Her father, a composer and music publisher, trained her in voice and harp. The family moved to London when she was 13, where she studied with Italian teachers. She made her debut at age 16, singing works by Haydn and Mozart. Dussek composed sonatas for harpsichord/piano, harp solo works, and duets or trios for harp, keyboard, and flute in varying combinations.
- May 1, 1783 – Phoebe Hinsdale Brown born, the first notable American woman hymnwriter; known for “I love to steal awhile away” based on her daily trip away from her house at a certain hour for meditation and prayer. The well-beaten path to the woods was discovered, and she was ridiculed by a thoughtless neighbor woman, so she tearfully wrote the hymn that night. Brown’s original poem included her domestic cares, but they were removed by Reverend Ashale Nettleton from the lyrics when the hymn was published.
- May 1, 1831 – Emily Stowe born, Canadian physician, suffragist, and women’s rights activist, first woman to practice medicine in Canada. Denied entrance into the Toronto School of Medicine in 1865, by the school’s Vice Principal, who said “The doors of the University are not open to women and I trust they never will be.” She earned her degree from the homeopathic New York Medical College for Women in 1867, then returned to Toronto to open her medical practice, attracting attention by lecturing on women’s health and running newspaper advertisements, which brought her a steady clientele. While studying medicine in New York, Stowe met Susan B. Anthony. Seeing the divisions within the American women’s suffrage movement, she decided to adopt a gradualist strategy in Canada. She founded the Toronto Women’s Literary Club in 1876. The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario granted Stowe a license to practice medicine in July, 1880, based on her experience with homeopathic medicine since 1850. Her daughter, Augusta Stowe-Gullen, was the first woman to earn a medical degree in Canada. In 1883, the Literary Club became the Canadian Women’s Suffrage Association. They campaigned for improved working conditions for women and pressured schools in Toronto to accept women into higher education. In 1883, a Suffrage Association public meeting led to the creation of the Ontario Medical College for Women. When the Dominion Women’s Enfranchisement Association was founded in 1889, Stowe became its first president and remained president until her death in 1903, fourteen years before Canadian women won the vote.
- May 1, 1852 – ‘Calamity Jane’ born as Martha Jane Canary, professional scout for U.S. Army, sharpshooter, performer in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.
- May 1, 1874 – Romaine Brooks born, American painter who worked in Paris and Capri., specializing in portraiture, using a subdued tonal palette keyed to the color gray. Brooks ignored the prevailing Cubism and Fauvism instead adhering to her own original aesthetic. She often depicted women in androgynous or masculine dress.
- May 1, 1881 – Mary MacLane born in Canada, American writer, dubbed “the Wild Woman of Butte.” Her controversial frank memoirs helped popularize the “tell all” style of autobiography. An outspoken feminist and openly bisexual, she submitted her first book for publication at age 19, calling it I Await the Devil’s Coming, which the publishers toned down to The Story of Mary MacLane. It still sold 100,000 copies in the first month, especially after it was pilloried by conservative critics and lightly ridiculed by H.L. Menken. She wrote with a raw, blistering honesty and self-awareness about sexual attraction to both men and women, her egoism and self-love, and even a desire to marry the Devil. The book’s success enabled her to travel, and escape the isolation of Butte. Her second and third books, My Friend Annabel Lee and I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days, did not sell as well. In 1917, she wrote and starred in a 90-minute silent film, Men Who Have Made Love to Me, based on an earlier article with the same title which she wrote for a Montana newspaper. The film was one of the first to “break the fourth wall” between performer and audience when she faced the camera and directly addressed her audience. Her work fell into obscurity during the 1930s, and her writing was long out of print when Elisabeth Pruitt rediscovered it. In 1993, she edited MacLane’s first book with some of her early newspaper feature work, in Tender Darkness: A Mary MacLane Anthology. Pruitt followed that with Human Days: A Mary MacLane Reader in 2011.
- May 1, 1890 – Clelia Lollini born, Italian physician. During WWI, she enlisted as a surgeon at a military hospital in Venice. In 1919, she attended the YWCA's International Conference of Women Physicians in New York, and gave a lecture on "Prostitution and Prophylaxis of Venereal Disease in Italy," describing her efforts to add social hygiene to Italian public school curricula. She helped found the Medical Women’s International Federation in 1919, with charter members representing 16 nations. She was a co-founder with Myra Carcupino-Ferrari of the Italian Women’s Medical Association in 1922, and opened a prenatal clinic for unmarried women in Rome. Earlier in her life, she suffered from tuberculosis, and this led to her being in charge of the Anti-Tubercular Consortium of Massa (1930-1938). Lollini spoke Italian, French, German, English, and Arabic.
- May 1, 1891 – Lillian Estelle Fisher born, American historian; one of the first women to earn a doctorate in Latin American history in the U.S. Fisher published important works on Spanish colonial administration, including The Background of the Movement for Mexican Independence. She also wrote a biography of Manuel Abad y Queipo, the reform bishop-elect of Michoacan, and an account of the Tupac Amaru rebellion in Peru.
- May 1, 1895 – May Hollinworth born, Australian theatre producer-director; director of the Sydney University Dramatic Society (1929-1943), then founded the Metropolitan Theatre in Sydney, and was its producer and director (1944-1950), mounting a mix of classics, including Shakespeare, and premiere productions of plays by Australian playwrights. Leo McKern, who went on to a distinguished career in the UK, was a member of the company. Illness forced her to leave the theatre, but Hollinworth later directed plays at two other Sydney theatres: the Independent and the Elizabethan Theatre.
- May 1, 1908 – Krstyna Sjaebek born, Polish agent of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) during WWII. She worked in Nazi-occupied France and Poland. Known for her daring and courage, she was the first woman SOE agent to serve in the field, and the longest-serving of Britain’s wartime women agents (1940-1944). Her resourcefulness and success strongly influenced the SOE’s decision to recruit more women for work in Nazi-occupied areas. She was first sent to Hungary, which was not yet in the war, but was leaning toward Germany, using the cover story that she was a journalist. Sjaebek helped set up a system of Polish couriers who brought intelligence reports from Warsaw to Budapest, and organised surveillance of all the rail, road, and river traffic on the Romanian and German borders. When she was arrested by the Hungarian police and turned over to the Gestapo, she feigned symptoms of pulmonary tuberculosis by biting her tongue until it bled, and a doctor diagnosed her (incorrectly) with terminal tuberculosis. The Germans released her, but she was followed, so she reached the British Embassy by stealth, and was smuggled out to Yugoslavia, with a British passport as ‘Christine Graville.’ She next went to Bulgaria, delivering microfilm to the British Legation of a German military buildup near the border with the Soviet Union, indicating a German invasion was imminent. The microfilm was forwarded to London, where it was seen by Winston Churchill, confirming less convincing information coming from other sources. Her most famous exploit was securing the release of SOE agents Francis Cammaerts and Xan Fielding from a German prison hours before they were to be executed in August 1944. She did so by meeting, at great personal risk, with the Gestapo commander in Digne-les-Bains, France, telling him she was a British agent, and persuading him with threats, lies, and a two million franc bribe to release the SOE agents. After the war, she became a naturalized British citizen, and legally changed her name to Christine Graville. She died at age 44 in London in 1952, stabbed to death by a spurned and obsessed suitor, who was hanged for her murder.
- May 1, 1910 – Raya Dunayevskaya born in Ukraine, American Marxist Humanist philosopher. At one time Leon Trotsky’s secretary, she later split with him and founded the ‘News and Letters Committees’ advocating for abolition of capitalism; she campaigned for women’s liberation and against discrimination toward race or age.
- May 1, 1910 – Behice Boran born, Turkish Marxist politician, author, and sociologist. She earned her Ph.D. in sociology in 1939 from the University of Michigan, and was a founding member of the Turkish Peacelovers Association.
- May 1, 1924 – Evelyn Boyd Granville born, African American academic, mathematician, and pioneer in computer science; the second American woman to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics, from Yale University in 1949. Honored by the National Academy of Engineering and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. She was also awarded the Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal by the Yale Graduate School Alumni Association.
- May 1, 1925 – Helen Balmuth Bamber born, British psychotherapist and human rights activist, who worked with Holocaust survivors after the concentration camps were liberated in 1945. A 20-something secretary working for a Harley Street doctor in London, she answered a call for volunteers to help Jewish survivors of Nazi concentration camps. As part of a Jewish Relief Unit rehabilitation team at Bergen-Belsen, just months after its liberation, she faced the daunting task of helping the camp’s 20,000 survivors with their physical and psychological recovery. She said, “I think it was something about repaying a debt. I was aware that if the Nazis had succeeded in invading England, we would have been the victims … when you were searching through things you were reminded of the enormity of it: once we came across a vast pile of shoes, sorted according to sizes, including children’s, all neatly lined up; you were never safe from that kind of confrontation.” She said survivors “would dig their fingers into your arms and hold on to you to get to you the horror of what had happened. Above all else, there was a need to tell you everything, over and over and over again. And this was the most significant thing for me, realizing that you had to take it all ... After a while I began to realise the most important role for me there was to bear witness.” She remained in Germany for 2½ years. After negotiating evacuation to Switzerland of a group of young survivors suffering from tuberculosis, she returned to England in 1947, where she worked with the Jewish Refugee Committee and the Committee for the Care of Young Children from Concentration Camps. She trained (1948-1955) to work with disturbed young adults and children while in close liaison with the Anna Freud Clinic, and also studied Social Science part-time at the London School of Economics. She married Rudi Bamberger, a German-Jewish refugee from Nuremberg who anglicized his name to Bamber. They had two sons, but the marriage ended in divorce in 1970. An early member of Amnesty International, she served on its Executive Council until 1980. She then co-founded the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture in 1985, to provide long-term care for survivors after initial therapy. In 2005, she created the Helen Bamber Foundation to help survivors of extreme cruelty and human rights violations. Throughout her life, she worked with those who were the most marginalized: Holocaust survivors, asylum-seekers, refugees, victims of the conflict in Northern Ireland, trafficked men, women, and children, survivors of genocide, torture, rape, female genital mutilation, British Far East prisoners of war, former hostages, and other people who suffered torture abroad. In 2013, Bamber ended her role as Clinical Director of the foundation, and assumed the role of Director Emeritus, a year before she died at age 89.
- May 1, 1936 – Danièle Huillet born, French filmmaker; with partner Jean-Marie Straub, she made two dozen films, noted for their rigorous intellectualism and radical politics; From the Clouds to the Resistance (1979) and Sicilia! (1999) are their best-regarded films.
- May 1, 1939 – Judy Collins born, influential American singer-songwriter and social activist against the Vietnam War and the proliferation of firearms. Collins has been a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and campaigned for the abolition of landmines.
- May 1, 1945 – Rita Coolidge born, American singer-songwriter and multi-Grammy winner; best known for “Fallen Angel” and “It’s All Over (All Over Again)” both co-written with Kris Kristofferson. In 1997, Coolidge, who is part Cherokee, founded Walela, a Native American music group, with her sister and daughter. Walela means ‘hummingbird’ in Cherokee.
- May 1, 1948 – Patricia Hill Collins born, African American sociologist and scholar; head of the African-American Studies Department at the University of Cincinnati; noted for Fighting Words: Black Women & the Search for Justice; Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, and Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender and the New Racism.
- May 1, 1950 – Gwendolyn Brooks becomes the first African-American woman to receive Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1950) for Annie Allen; She was an Honorary Consultant in American Letters to the Library of Congress (1973-1976), then served as the 1985-1986 Library of Congress Consultant in Poetry (now called Poet Laureate).
- May 1, 1959 – Yasmina Reza born, French playwright, actress, novelist, and screenwriter best known for her plays Conversations after a Burial; Art; and God of Carnage. Conversations after a Burial and Art both won Molière Awards, and the English language Broadway production of God of Carnage won the 2009 Tony Award for Best Play.
- May 1, 2009 – Same-sex marriage is legalized in Sweden.
- May 1, 2015 – Yamani Yansá Hernandez joined the National Network of Abortion Funds as Executive Director. NNAF mobilizes its nearly 100 member abortion funds and organizations to eliminate economic barriers to abortion for low-income women, women of color, girls, and transgender and gender non-conforming people across the United States.
- May 1, 2018 – The Pentagon FY2017 report on sexual assault in the U.S. military showed an increase in reporting of sexual assault, but changes in the Uniform Code of Military Justice since 2012 requiring more evidence before going forward with some cases reduced the number of courts-martial and convictions. The number of reported cases of sexual assault rose nearly 10%, from 6,172 in fiscal 2016 to 6,769 in fiscal 2017. The Marine Corps alone saw a nearly 15% increase, with a total of 998 reported cases. However, the percentage of substantiated sexual assault cases in which charges were preferred to courts-martial dropped from 71% in fiscal 2013 to 54% in fiscal 2017. “An increase in reporting is only good if it leads to justice,” Service Women’s Action Network CEO Lydia Watts said. “It hasn't. Despite the increase in reporting, actual convictions from sexual assault reports have decreased over the last three years. The military is encouraging victims to come forward, and when they do, it hangs them out to dry.”
- May 1, 2020 – The World Cup champion U.S. women's soccer team vowed to fight on after a judge dismissed key parts of their lawsuit seeking compensation equal to that of their male counterparts. Federal Judge R. Gary Klausner rejected the women's team's argument over receiving lower pay than the U.S. men's team. He also dismissed a claim of unequal working conditions related to the number of turf and real grass pitches. While the judge did allow other claims in the lawsuit to move forward to trial, Klausner pointed to differences in the structure of the men's and women's contracts — contracts to which they agreed in collective bargaining. A trial for the remaining portions of the lawsuit, which include allegations of differences in men's and women's travel and hotel accommodations, was set to begin in June, 2020. In December 2020, the team and the U.S. Soccer federation settled their long-running lawsuit over inequitable working conditions compared with the men’s team while leaving their dispute over unequal pay for additional litigation. The deal with the women and the sport’s U.S. governing body called for charter flights, hotel accommodations, venue selection, and professional staff support equitable to that of the men’s national team. In February 2022, a $24 million settlement agreement was reached, contingent on a collective bargaining agreement producing a single contract that will cover both the women’s and the men’s teams.
- May 1, 2021 – Shannon Walker, American physicist and NASA astronaut (2004-2020); one of four astronauts aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Resilience Expedition 64 who splashed down safely off the coast of Panama City, Florida, in the first nighttime splashdown since NASA’s Apollo 8 in 1968. The astronauts spent 168 days orbiting Earth. It was the first round-trip operational mission for NASA led by a private company. Walker served as Crew-1 Mission Specialist and Flight Engineer for Expedition 64, and became supervisor of the 2021 Class of Astronauts.
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- May 2, 1536 – Anne Boleyn, Queen of England, is arrested and imprisoned on charges of adultery, incest, treason, and witchcraft.
- May 2, 1559 – Clergyman John Knox, founder of Presbyterianism, returned to Scotland from Geneva to lead the Scottish Reformation, after denouncing all womankind (and Mary, Queen of Scots, in particular) in his infamous pamphlet The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women.
- May 2, 1729 – Catherine the Great born in Prussia, Empress of Russia (1762-1796), first as wife of Peter III, then in her own right after aiding a coup d'état against Peter. After she was inoculated against smallpox by Scottish doctor Thomas Dimsdale, she sought to have people inoculated throughout the empire. By 1800, about 2 million Russians had been inoculated.
- May 2, 1759 – The Corporation for Relief of Poor and Distressed Widows and Children of Presbyterian Ministers, the first life insurance program in the U.S., began operations. The Presbyterian Presbytery of Philadelphia formed “The Fund for Pious Uses” in 1718 to assist local Presbyterian ministers and their families. In 1754, Dr. Francis Allison proposed offering life insurance to ministers rather than just charitable grants to ailing ministers and families of deceased ministers, and the “Widow’s Fund” was established. In 1777, the corporation loaned 5,000 pounds to the Continental Congress to help pay George Washington’s soldiers.
- May 2, 1813 – Caroline Leigh Gascoigne born, English poet and novelist; noted for The School for Wives.
- May 2, 1822 – Jane Miller Thengberg born, daughter of a Scottish father and a Swedish mother; founder, teacher, and administrator of Klosterskolan, a girls’ school in Uppsala (1855-1863); then principal (1863-1868) of Högre lärarinneseminariet (Advanced Seminary for Female Teachers) in Stockholm. Though active in contemporary debate about the educational system in Sweden, she regarded equal education with men as a necessity for women to be better wives and mothers, not preparation to follow a profession. She resigned from Högre lärarinneseminariet when she married her second husband in 1868.
- May 2, 1878 – Nannie Helen Burroughs born, African-American civil rights activist, businesswoman, lecturer, and educator. She was the founder of the National Training School for Women and Girls in Washington D.C., and gave a speech at the 1900 National Baptist Convention, "How the Sisters Are Hindered from Helping.”
- May 2, 1882 – Isabel González born, Puerto Rican activist; plaintiff in Gonzales v. Williams (1904). As a young pregnant woman, in 1903 she tried to enter the U.S. to reunite with and marry her fiancé, but the U.S. Treasury Department refused her entry as an alien, “likely to become a public charge,” when she reached New York City. The Williams in the case was William Williams, the U.S. Commissioner of Immigration at the Port of New York. Her case was appealed from the U.S. Circuit Court for the NY Southern District after her Writ of Habeas Corpus was dismissed. The Supreme Court case was the first time the Court ruled on citizenship status of inhabitants of territories acquired by the U.S. González brought attention not only to her case, but the status of all Puerto Ricans by writing letters which were published in the New York Times. The Court’s ruling was ambiguous at best, declaring that under the immigration laws of the time, González was not an alien, and therefore could not be denied entry into New York. But the Court declined to declare that she was a U.S. citizen. The question of the citizenship status of inhabitants of the new island territories remained confusing, ambiguous, and contested. Puerto Ricans were known as “noncitizen nationals.” Isabel González became a U.S. citizen by marrying her fiancé, but continued with others to press the cause of U.S citizenship for all Puerto Ricans. It finally became a reality in 1917, with the passage of the Jones-Shaforth Act, which conferred U.S. Citizenship on all Puerto Ricans, mostly so the men could be drafted for military service in WWI.
- May 2, 1915 – Doris Fisher born, American singer-songwriter and composer; she sang with Eddy Duchin’s band, and was the co-creator of “Tutti Frutti,” "You Always Hurt the One You Love," "Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall," and "Put the Blame on Mame."
- May 2, 1915 – Effie Hotchkiss set out from New York on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, with her mother Avis Hotchkiss in the sidecar, to become the first woman to cross the U.S. on a motorcycle. They visited the Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, then two months later, poured a jar of Atlantic Ocean water into the Pacific Ocean for photographers to mark their success as the first transcontinental woman motorcyclists.
- May 2, 1932 – Pearl S. Buck awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Literature for The Good Earth.
- May 2, 1936 – Norma Aleandro born, Argentine actress, screenwriter, and theatrical director. She won the Cannes Award for best actress for her role in the 1985 film, The Official Story. Aleandro wrote the screenplay for 1970 film, The Inheritors. After she criticized Argentina’s military dictatorship (1976-1983), she was given 24 hours to leave the country. She, her husband, and their son spent ten years in exile in Uruguay and Spain before they could return to Argentina.
- May 2, 1947 – Lynda Myles born, British writer, producer, and film festival organizer; director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival; produced film adaptations of Irish writer Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown Trilogy: The Commitments; The Snapper; and The Van.
- May 2, 1968 – Julia Hartley-Brewer born, British journalist, newspaper columnist, and radio news presenter; political correspondent for The Evening Standard, The Guardian, and the Sunday Express, where she became political editor (2001-2007). In 2006, she presented and narrated televised political documentaries for BBC Two and BBC Four about the history of British Deputy Prime Ministers, called Every Prime Minister Needs a Willie, and the history of the Leader of the Opposition in The Worst Job in Politics.
- May 2, 1985 – Lily Allen born, English singer-songwriter, talk show host, and author of My Thoughts Exactly. She is a socialist, and campaigns for renewable energy.
- May 2, 1999 – Mireya Moscoso becomes the first woman elected President of Panama; oversaw transition of control of the Panama Canal from the U.S. to Panama.
- May 2, 2014 – Protesters cities worldwide demand that the Nigerian government take more decisive action to find and free the schoolgirls abducted by the terrorist organization Boko Haram. Over 250 teenage girls were taken from their schools, and it is believed they were sold into forced “marriages.” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry called the abductions an “unconscionable crime,” and pledged U.S. support to help in finding the girls.
- May 2, 2017 – Hillary Clinton made her strongest statements against Donald Trump since the 2016 election, declaring herself "part of the resistance." Clinton took personal responsibility for her defeat, saying she made some big mistakes in her campaign, but said she would have won had it not been for FBI Director James Comey's letter to Congress, just days before the vote, reviving questions over her use of a private email server while serving as Obama's secretary of state. "If the election had been on October 27, I would be your president," she told CNN's Christiane Amanpour at a Woman for Women event in New York.
- May 2, 2019 – Donald Trump announced expansion of protections for health-care providers and insurers who refuse to offer or pay for procedures they say violate their religious beliefs. The new Health and Human Services rule doubles down on protections Congress developed in 2018, and explicitly mentions abortion, sterilization, and assisted suicide as procedures that health-care workers and insurers can refuse to provide. Conservative groups pushed for the protections, citing “religious liberty.” The ACLU, LGBTQ, and women's advocacy groups decried the expanded protections, saying they allow doctors refuse to treat LGBTQ people or provide other essential services. California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, and several California City Attorneys, brought suits. An appeal of the first ruling, unfavorable to these plaintiffs, was filed in March, 2020. In February, 2021, the consolidated appeals were placed in abeyance while new leadership at HHS “evaluates the issues the cases present.” In December 2022, HHS partially rescinded the rule after three federal district courts held the Trump-era rule unlawful.
- May 2, 2020 – Women in the U.S. experience disproportionate effects of the economic downturn during the coronavirus pandemic compared to men. “The biggest factor is that women are more likely to be concentrated in the service sector,” which was particularly hard hit, said C. Nicole Mason, president and CEO of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR). With schools closed and day care centers struggling to stay open, the burden of child care falls harder on women. They “have a difficult choice” of continuing to earn or caring for their family. Women filed the majority of new unemployment claims in at least 17 states in the weeks after governors enacted closures to curb the spread of the virus. Nationally, women made up nearly 60% of job losses and outnumbered men’s losses in almost all sectors of the economy, a report from IWPR shows.
- May 2, 2021 – American singer-songwriter Billie Eilish, speaking out about sexual exploitation, said in Vogue magazine interview that her song “Your Power” was “really not about one person. You might think, ‘it’s because she’s in the music industry’, no dude. It’s everywhere. I don’t know one girl or woman who hasn’t had a weird experience or a really bad experience. And men too – young boys are taken advantage of constantly. It doesn’t matter who you are, what your life is, your situation, who you surround yourself with, how strong you are, how smart you are. You can always be taken advantage of. That’s a big problem in the world of domestic abuse or statutory rape – girls that were very confident and strong-willed finding themselves in situations where they’re like, ‘oh my god, I’m the victim here?’ And it’s so embarrassing and humiliating and demoralising to be in that position of thinking you know so much and then you realise, I’m being abused right now.”
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- May 3, 1446 – Margaret of York born, Duchess of Burgundy as Charles the Bold’s third wife, the last of the House of Valois after Charles was killed in 1477 at the Battle of Nancy in Lorraine. Margaret became protector of the duchy and adviser to her step-daughter Mary, now the Duchess of Burgundy. As Dowager Duchess, Margaret was a skillful and intelligent politician, and was much needed as her step-daughter became besieged by suitors, and Burgundy was vulnerable to attacks from all sides by the French. Margaret persuaded her brother, King Edward IV of England, to send enough troops to bolster resistance to the French advances. The French King, Louis XI, saw the danger Margaret posed to him, and tried to buy her off with a French pension and a promise of his personal protection, which she contemptuously refused. She strongly advised the new Duchess to accept the proposal of Maximilian of Habsburg, son of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III, to whom her father had betrothed her. Maximilian was ambitious and active enough, in Margaret’s opinion, to defend Mary’s legacy. They were married in August, 1477, and their first child, a son, was born in July 1478, followed in 1480 by a daughter. But in 1482, Mary broke her back in a fall from her horse, and died in March. Margaret lost her much-loved step-daughter, and Burgundy was plunged into political chaos. The Burgundians, sick of the long war with France, refused to accept Maximilian as regent for his 4-year-old son Duke Philip, or even as guardian for the children. The Three Estates of the Burgundian Lowlands signed the Treaty of Arras with Louis XI, granting him the Burgundian Lowlands, Picardy, and the county of Boulogne. Margaret was unable to get any further help from her brother because he made a truce with France. Maximilian’s only option was to make a personal peace with Louis by arranging the betrothal of his two-year-old daughter, named Margaret in honor of the Dowager Duchess, to the young Dauphin of France. The toddler was sent to be raised at the French court, taking with her as dowry the Free County of Burgundy and the County of Artois. Maximilian, summoned back to Austria by his father in 1489, left Margaret to govern the remains of Burgundy together with the Burgundian Estates, and in guardianship of the young Duke Philip. Margaret next lost her brother, the Duke of Clarence, executed by their brother King Edward in 1478. Edward died in 1483, and finally her youngest brother, Richard III, was killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, ending the rule of England by the House of York. She offered financial backing to challengers to the Tudors, even hiring continental mercenaries for Perkin Warbeck, supposed son of Edward IV, who likely was an impostor, but he lost the Battle of Deal in 1495, and was executed by Henry VII, the Tudor king. Henry found Margaret problematic, but she was protected by Maximilian, whose father, the Holy Roman Emperor, backed him. She died in 1503, at the age of 57, just three years before the untimely death of Duke Philip, at age 29, from typhoid fever. Margaret was a patron of dozens of illuminated manuscripts, and a patron of William Caxton, who introduced the new art of printing to England. Caxton made a special presentation copy of Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, the first book printed in the English language, for her, which included a special engraving of Caxton presenting the book to Margaret.
- May 3, 1481 – Juana de la Cruz Vázquez y Gutiérrez born, Spanish abbess of the Franciscan Third Order Regular, a mystic who experienced visions, muteness, and the stigmata; the Church authorized her to preach publicly, an extraordinary permission for a woman in that time; 72 of her sermons were collected in 1509 in The Conhorte.
- May 3, 1825 – Laura M. Towne born, American abolitionist, physician, educator, and Unitarian missionary who relocated to South Carolina in 1862 to provide medical care and education to freed slaves. There she founded the Penn School (1884-1948, later called Penn Center), named for William Penn, on St. Helena Island in the Sea Islands, the first school for newly freed slaves in the U.S. She was joined by Quaker Ellen Murray, and Charlotte Forten, the school’s first black teacher. Towne died in 1901 at age 76.
- May 3, 1839 – Annie Blair Etheridge born, American nurse and vivandière (food service) on the Union side in the U.S. Civil War. She enlisted with her husband in the Second Michigan Voluntary Infantry, and continued with the Fifth Michigan, after her husband deserted, until 1864. Known for her courage under fire, she carried pistols for her protection and saddlebags filled with medical supplies. Etheridge rode into the front lines on horseback to aid wounded soldiers, her skirts often torn by bullets. In 1864, all women were ordered out of camp by General Ulysses S. Grant. Though her admirable service was attested in a petition signed by numerous officers and addressed to General Grant to allow Etheridge to remain, it was not successful. "Gentle Annie" then worked for the Hospital Transport Service, a subcommittee of the U.S. Sanitary Commission. Assigned to the Knickerbocker, under Amy M. Bradley, she aided in transporting wounded men from Alexandria, Virginia, to Philadelphia, New York City, and Washington. For her work and courage, she was one of only two women who received the Kearny Cross, awarded to any Union soldier who displayed meritorious, heroic, or distinguished acts while in the face of an enemy force. Though Etheridge was never paid during her service, when she mustered out in July 1865, she applied for and eventually received a pension of $25 a month. She then worked for the U.S. Treasury Department in Washington D.C. When she died in 1913, she was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
- May 3, 1897 – Esther Graff born, Danish businesswoman and feminist. She worked for the transnational consumer goods company Unilever (1922-1942), then became CEO of the Danish branch of the marketing communications Lintas (now Mullen Lowe Lintas Group). She was president of the International Alliance for Women (1952-1958), an NGO promoting women’s human rights and gender equality.
- May 3, 1898 – Septima Poinsette Clark born, American educator and civil rights activist, who developed literacy and citizenship workshops to help African Americans pass literacy and civics exams designed to keep them from registering to vote; Martin Luther King, Jr. called her “The Mother of the Movement.”
- May 3, 1898 – Golda Meir born in Ukraine, moved with family to the U.S. in 1906; Israeli educator and politician, first, and to date only, woman Prime Minister of Israel (1969-1974).
- May 3, 1901 – Estelle Massey Osborne born, first African American to earn a Master’s degree in Nursing Education, and the first Black American head nurse (1923-1926), at St. Louis Hospital #2 in Missouri; she returned to school, earned her B.S. (1929) and her Master of Science degree (1931); President of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (1934-1939); consultant to the National Nursing Council for War Services (1943-1945); served on the American Nurses Association (ANA) board (1948-1952); posthumously inducted into the ANA Hall of Fame.
- May 3, 1912 – May Sarton born in Belgium, her family fled to the U.S when the Germans invaded Belgium during WWI; prolific American poet, memoirist, and novelist; noted for Journal of a Solitude; Plant Dreaming Deep; The House by the Sea; Honey in the Hive; A Durable Fire; and At Seventy. Her 1965 novel, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, was ahead of its time in its positive depiction of homosexual and bisexual love. Sarton died at age 83 of breast cancer in 1995. Her last journal, Coming Into Eighty, was published posthumously.
- May 3, 1917 – Betty Comden born, American screenwriter and librettist for Broadway and Hollywood musicals with comedy partner Adolph Green; notable for Bells Are Ringing, Singin’ in the Rain, and the screenplay for Auntie Mame (1958).
- May 3, 1923 – Clara Shepard Luper born, civil rights leader and teacher; earned a Master of Arts degree in History Education in 1951; advisor for the Oklahoma City NAACP Youth Council in 1957, and led them in 1958 in a successful sit-in at Katz drugstore, resulting in the Katz corporation desegregating their lunch counters in three states; she campaigned for equal banking rights, employment opportunities, open housing, and voting rights (1958-1964); in 1968, she was one of the few Black teachers hired at a previously segregated Oklahoma City high school, part of a court-ordered desegregation plan; co-author of Behold the Walls (1979).
- May 3, 1933 – Nellie Tayloe Ross appointed as the first woman director of the United States Mint, serving until 1953.
- May 3, 1937 – Nélida Piñon born, Brazilian author, won the Walmap Prize, 1970, for her historical novel, Fundador (Founders), known for A Republica dos Sonhos (The Republic of Dreams), President of Academia Brasileira de Letras (Brazilian Academy of Letters).
- May 3, 1951 – Tatyana Tolstaya born, Russian writer, TV host, publicist, novelist, and essayist; noted for her dystopian novel, The Slynx; her acerbic essays on Russian life. Host of the Russian cultural television programme, Школа злословия (The School for Scandal), from 2002 to 2014.
- May 3, 1959 – Uma Bharti born, Indian Bharatiya Janata Party vice president; Cabinet Minister (2014-2019); Minister of Drinking Water & Sanitation (2017-2019); Minister of Water Resources, River Development & Ganga Rejuvenation (2014-2017).
- May 3, 1960 – The Anne Frank House opens in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
- May 3, 1961 – Leyla Zana born, Kurdish politician, peace and human rights activist; pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party member until it was banned; elected as an Independent to the Grand National Assembly (1991-1994); imprisoned for 10 years when Turkish courts ruled her activities were against the unity of the country (1994-2004); first Kurdish woman elected to Parliament (2011-2018).
- May 3, 1963 – Mona Siddiqui born in Pakistan, British Professor of Islamic and Interreligious Studies at the University of Edinburgh, first person to hold this chair, and Dean International for the Middle East; her family moved to England when she was 5 years old; fluent in English, French, Arabic and Urdu. She is a regular contributor to programs on BBC Radio 4.
- May 3, 1979 – Genevieve Nnaji born, Nigerian actress, producer, and director. Her directorial debut in 2018, Lionheart, was the first Nigerian submission for the Best International Feature Film at the Academy Awards, but the film was disqualified because most of the dialogue was in English, which caused several Oscar watchers to raise objections, since English is the official language of Nigeria. Over 500 languages are spoken by the country’s diverse population, so English, the most widely spoken language in the former British colony, was chosen as Nigeria’s official language.
- May 3, 1987 – Raffi Freedman-Gurspan born, Honduran-American transgender rights activist; in 2015, during the Obama administration, she became the Outreach and Recruitment Director in the Presidential Personnel Office, the first openly transgender person to work as a White House staffer.
- May 3, 1996 – Prevent Teen & Unplanned Pregnancy Day, sponsored by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, founded to combat high rates of teen pregnancy in the U.S., but now expanded to include all unplanned pregnancies. The 1996 U.S. rate of 24 births per 1,000 adolescent girls, ages 15 to 19, was over double the rate in Canada. The most effective programs to prevent teen pregnancies include two key components: education about sexual practices and their consequences, and access to contraception, but many school districts offer Abstinence-Only programs, which studies cited in the Journal of Adolescent Health show are far less effective in preventing teen pregnancy.
- May 3, 2018 – The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) announced its Board of Governors voted to expel actor Bill Cosby and director Roman Polanski. The organization said the men did not meet its standards of conduct to "uphold the Academy's values of respect for human dignity." In April, 2018, Cosby was found guilty on three counts of indecent aggravated assault, after being convicted of drugging and sexually assaulting plaintiff Andrea Constand in 2004. Polanski, director of Chinatown and Rosemary's Baby, lived as a fugitive outside the U.S. after being charged with drugging and raping a 13-year-old in 1977. He received six Oscar nominations, and won Best Director for The Pianist in 2002.
- May 3, 2018 – The Washington Post reported another 27 women have accused veteran journalist Charlie Rose of sexual misconduct in the workplace. CBS News fired Rose in 2017 after eight women accused him of sexual harassment. Others told managers about Rose's alleged behavior as early as 1986 and as recently as 2017. New allegations date back as far as 1976, when Rose allegedly inappropriately exposed his penis to a former research assistant while working at NBC News. "Management, numerous broadcasters, and studio staff ... failed and refused to take any remedial action," said an attorney representing three of the women.
- May 3, 2020 – A report by the International Committee on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe (ICRSWE) shows sex workers across Europe live in the “economic margins” and often have less savings and government support to fall back on, but rarely benefit from pandemic response and recovery plans. In-person sex work exposes workers to increased risk of contracting the virus if they keep working. But without work, as strip clubs close and clients dwindle, sex workers struggle to survive. Sex workers are often from groups that are already marginalized economically and socially, such as undocumented migrants, people of color, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people, many pushed out of their families due to homophobia. The report asks European governments to issue urgent moratoriums on raids, arrests, and prosecutions for sex work, provide financial support to sex workers, and ensure sex worker-led organizations are included in distribution of emergency assistance. Human Rights Watch documented the harmful impact of laws criminalizing sex work in countries including the U. S., South Africa, and Tanzania. The ICRSWE argues governments should decriminalize sex work, and carry out consultations with sex workers to establish a framework that “respects their human rights and improves their safety and working conditions.”
- May 3, 2021 – In the UK, in what the Home Office called “the biggest changes to the marriage registration system since 1837,” marriage certificates in England and Wales will now include the names of both parents of each half of the couple, instead of only their fathers. The change is part of the introduction of a new digital system to modernise, simplify, and speed up the process by which marriages are registered, helping to tackle a backlog. Marriages had been registered by the couple signing a register book, held at each register office, in churches and chapels, and at registered religious premises, but will now be handled by a single electronic marriage register, saving time and money, as well as being more secure, as the new system eliminates the need for data to be extracted from hard copies. Adding the names of the mothers of the bride and groom will “correct a historic anomaly.”
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- May 4, 1749 – Charlotte Turner Smith born, English Romantic poet and novelist, contributed to a revival of the sonnet, and the conventions of Gothic fiction; forced into marriage at 15 by her father, she spent many unhappy years married to a violent drunkard. His extravagance landed them in debtors’ prison, where she began her writing career in order to pay their way out. Eventually she left him, as his increasing rages made her fear for her life.
- May 4, 1898 – Captain Joy Bright Hancock born, American naval officer, veteran of both WWI and WWII; Lady in the Navy: A Personal Reminiscence.
- May 4, 1907 – Mary Hallaren born, first woman to officially join the regular U.S. Army (as a woman under her own name, rather than disguised as a man); director of the Women’s Army Corps; recipient of the Legion of Merit with Oak Leaf Cluster, the Bronze Star, and the Army Commendation Medal; elected to the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1996.
- May 4, 1916 – Jane Jacobs born, American-Canadian journalist and activist, pioneer in urban studies and “slum clearance” opponent, wrote The Death and Life of American Cities (1961) showing how urban renewal did not address the needs of urban dwellers, and introduced "eyes on the street" and “social capital’ concepts. She was criticized as a “housewife” and “crazy dame” in the male-dominated field of urban planning, but later honored as Officer of the Order of Canada, and Order of Ontario.
- May 4, 1925 – Ruth First born, South African Jewish Anti-Apartheid activist, journalist, and academic. At University of the Witwatersrand, she helped found the Federation of Progressive Students. Among her fellow students were Nelson Mandela, her future husband and fellow activist Joe Slovo, and Mozambican Eduardo Mondlane, who became the first leader of the Liberation Front of Mozambique (FRELIMO). She was editor-in-chief of the radical newspaper The Guardian in 1946, which was banned by the Apartheid regime. First and Slovo were members of the Communist Party, and of the African National Congress, and participated in many protests. In 1955, she was the editor of Fighting Talk, a radical political journal. In the Treason Trial of 1956-1961, she was one of the first defendants, with 156 other leading anti-apartheid activists, all key figures in the Congress Alliance. After the state of emergency following the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, she was listed and banned. She could not attend meetings or publish, and she could not be quoted. In 1963, during another government crackdown, she became the first white woman imprisoned and held in isolation without charge for 117 days under the Ninety-Day Detention Law. Her book, 117 Days, is an account of her arrest, imprisonment, and interrogation by the South African Police Special Branch. In March 1964, she went into exile in London, and was active in the British Anti-Apartheid Movement. In 1978, she became director of research at the Centre of African Studies (Centro de Estudos Africanos), part of the university in Maputo, Mozambique. Ruth First was assassinated on August 17, 1982, when she opened a parcel bomb addressed to her at her university office. It was later determined that her assassination was ordered by Major Craig Williamson of the South African Police.
- May 4, 1929 – Audrey Hepburn born in Belgium, British-American actress, film star, and humanitarian. Known for her performances in Roman Holiday, Gigi, Sabrina, Funny Face, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Charade. and Wait Until Dark. As a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, she promoted immunization campaigns to end measles, tuberculosis, tetanus, whooping cough, diphtheria, and polio; and for clean water and school building projects; she testified before U.S. Congress. Hepburn launched UNICEF's State of the World's Children reports. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1992.
- May 4, 1951 – Colleen Hanabusa born, American Democratic politician and labor lawyer; Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Hawaii’s First District (2016-2019); first woman President of the Hawaiian senate (2009-2010); Member of the Hawaiian senate (1999-2010).
- May 4, 1957 – Marijke Vos born, Dutch peace and anti-nuclear activist and GreenLeft politician; Amsterdam alderwoman for the Environment and Healthcare since 2006; member of the Dutch Parliament (1994-2005).
- May 4, 1958 – Jane Hodgson Kennedy born, British Labour politician; inaugural Merseyside Police and Crime Commissioner (2012-2021); Member of Parliament (1992-2010).
- May 4, 2011 – Jurors in the trial for the strangulation murders of Sheri Coleman and her two sons, began deliberations. Prosecutors said her husband killed his family to advance a love affair and protect his job as the bodyguard for Christian televangelist Joyce Meyer. He was found guilty of first-degree murder, and sentenced to life in prison.
- May 4, 2019 – A preliminary study presented at the American Academy of Neurology’s 71st Annual Meeting in Philadelphia suggests that women with the relapsing-remitting form of MS (Mutiple Sclerosis) may not experience a flare-up again after pregnancy, as had been long believed. “These results are exciting, as MS is more common among women of childbearing age than in any other group,” said study author Annette Langer-Gould, MD, Ph.D., of Kaiser Permanente Southern California in Pasadena, CA, and a member of the American Academy of Neurology. “This shows us that women with MS today can have children, breastfeed and resume their treatment without experiencing an increased risk of relapses during the postpartum period.” Langer-Gould said the information on an increased risk of relapse after pregnancy was determined more than 20 years ago, before disease-modifying treatments were available and before MRI scans could be used to help diagnose the disease after just one attack. The study also found that women who breastfed exclusively, meaning that the child received only breast milk for at least two months, were about 40 percent less likely to have a relapse than women who did not breastfeed.
- May 4, 2021 – Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) raised the ire of her fellow Republicans again by clashing with Donald Trump over his continuing false claims that vote fraud cost him the November election. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California) said he heard mounting concerns from GOP lawmakers about the ability of Cheney to "carry out the message" as the No. 3 House Republican. A Fox News hot mic captured McCarthy telling a host that he had “had it with her.” Cheney was removed from her leadership position in the Republican caucus of the House of Representatives on May 12, 2021, after telling the caucus, “If you want leaders who will enable and spread his destructive lies, I’m not your person – you have plenty of others to choose from. That will be their legacy.” Immediately after the meeting, Cheney said she was “absolutely committed” to not embracing Donald Trump’s “big lie” about the election. “We cannot both embrace the big lie and embrace the constitution,” Cheney said. “The nation needs it: the nation needs a Republican party that is based upon fundamental principles of conservatism, and I am committed and dedicated to ensuring that that’s how this party goes forward, and I plan to lead the fight to do that.”
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- May 5, 1809 – Mary Dixon Kies awarded a U.S. patent, for a technique of weaving straw with silk and thread which speeded up hat-making, the first woman to apply to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in her own name. Prior to 1790, only men could author a patent. The Patent Act of 1790 opened the door for any male or female to protect his or her invention with a patent. However, in many states, women could not legally own property (except widows, if their inheritance had not been bound up in a trust), or sign contracts independent of their husbands or fathers.
- May 5, 1864 – Nellie Bly born, pen-name of American journalist and author Elizabeth Jane Cochrane, a pioneer of investigative journalism, especially for her exposé of conditions in a mental institution, and for her record-breaking trip around the world in 72 days.
- May 5, 1882 – Sylvia Pankhurst born, British suffragist and socialist activist; began working full-time for the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1906, founded by her mother Emmeline Pankhurst and her sister Christabel. She devised the WSPU logo, and many of its leaflets, banners, and posters. In 1907, she toured industrial towns in England and Scotland, painting portraits of working women and helping to establish the WSPU presence in Leicester. Unlike her mother and sister, she kept her affiliation with the labour movement, and did most of her campaigning among women labourers. Arrested many times, and sent to prison, she was repeatedly force-fed during hunger strikes. She wanted the WSPU to be aligned with the socialist movement and tackle more issues than women’s suffrage. In 1913, she was expelled from the WSPU, and founded the East London Federation of Suffragettes in 1914, later the Workers’ Socialist Federation (WSF). She was founder/editor of Women’s (Workers’) Dreadnought. The WSF campaigned against WWI, unlike the WSPU, which supported the war drive and military conscription. The WSF spoke in support of women in the poorer parts of London, and set up “cost-price” restaurants to feed the hungry without the taint of charity. The WSF also helped soldiers’ wives by setting up legal advice centres, and campaigning for the government to provide allowances for poor soldiers’ wives. In 1936, she became a strong supporter of Ethiopia, moving to Addis Ababa in the 1950s, and was editor of the Ethiopia Observer. When she died in 1960, Haile Selassie named her “an honorary Ethiopian.” Pankhurst is the only foreigner buried in front of Holy Trinity Cathedral in the capital, in a section for patriots of the war against the Italian invasion.
- May 5, 1884 – Alice Milliat born, French pioneer in women’s sports and feminist. Her lobbying on behalf of women athletes forced inclusion of women’s events in the Olympic Games. A translator by profession, she participated in rowing, and was an avid swimmer and hockey player. Milliat was a member of Femina Sport, a club founded in 1911, and was one of the organizers of the Federation Francaise Sportive Feminine. In 1921, she organized the first international women’s sports event, a five-day multi-sport tournament held in Monte Carlo, and held again in 1922 and 1924. The Federation Francaise Sportive Feminine held the 1921 Women’s Olympic Games in Paris in 1922, with participants from Czechoslovakia, Great Britain, Switzerland, the U.S., and host country France. Use of 'Olympic Games' infuriated the International Olympic Committee, and they convinced Milliat and the FSFI to change their event’s name in exchange for a promise to add ten women's events to the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam. Baron Pierre De Coubertin, credited for reintroducing the Olympic Games to the modern world, was one of the most vocal opponents to women's participation in the games. The 1926 games held by the women in Sweden were renamed the Women’s World Games. The IOC didn’t fully live up to its promise – only five women’s track and field events actually debuted in Amsterdam. The IOC ruled afterwards that women were “too frail” for long distance running, so women’s Olympic running events were limited to 200 meters until the 1960s. The Tokyo 2020 Games marked the first Summer Olympics where men's events were outnumbered by the combined total of women's and mixed events. However, Milliat's continued pressure greatly expanded women's representation at the Olympics.
- May 5, 1892 – Dorothy A.E. Garrod born, English archaeologist, pioneer in Near Eastern prehistory, directed excavations at Mount Carmel in Palestine (1929-1934) which spanned 200,000 years of human habitation. Her finds included over 92,000 stone tools, and numerous human fossils, including the skeleton of a female Neanderthal dated c. 110,000 BC, the first ever to be found outside Europe. These finds put Near Eastern prehistory on the map. She also directed Paleolithic research at Gibraltar and in Kurdistan. As a leading authority on the Paleolithic, Garrod was the first woman to hold a chair at University of Cambridge, as a Professor of Archaeology (1939-1952), and the first woman to hold an Oxbridge chair. However, she was excluded from speaking or voting on University matters until 1948. Garrod wrote the ground-breaking book, The Stone Age of Mount Carmel, and also The Upper Paleolithic of Britain.
- May 5, 1898 – Elsie Eaves born, American civil engineer; first woman associate member, and first woman admitted to full membership, in the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE); founding member of the American Association of Cost Engineering (renamed the Association for the Advancement of Cost Engineering). She started her career as a draftsperson for the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads in Colorado, and for the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad, then got her civil engineering degree in 1920 from the University of Colorado. Eaves worked for McGraw-Hill in New York (1926-1963), on the Engineering News-Record and other publications, retiring as the manager of Business News. She created databases on engineering projects and trends across the U.S., before there were computers to compile the information. After retiring from McGraw-Hill, Eaves advised the National Commission on Urban Affairs on housing costs.. In 1974, she was honored with the George Norlin Silver Medal, the University of Colorado’s highest alumni award.
- May 5, 1900 – Helen Redfield born, American geneticist who did extensive research on Drosophila Melanogaster, the common fruit fly, at Stanford University, Columbia, and the California Institute of Technology, then as a research associate at the Institute for Cancer Research (1951-1961).
- May 5, 1907 – ‘Iryna Vilde’ born as Daryna Makohon, Ukrainian author and Soviet correspondent; wrote short stories and novels about family life and society in the Western Ukraine; best known for her two-volume novel Sestry Richynski (Sisters of Richynsky), which won the Shevchenko Prize.
- May 5, 1911 – Pritilata Waddedar born, Bengali educator and revolutionary nationalist, teacher and headmistress at Nandankanan Aparnacharan School in Chittagong; she committed suicide rather than be arrested by British authorities after an attack on a European club.
- May 5, 1921 – Mavis Lever Batey born, leading woman codebreaker at Bletchley Park, Britain’s top secret center for codebreaking operations during WWII. At age 19, she worked in the London Section, checking personal ads in The Times for coded spy messages, before being recruited as a Bletchley codebreaker in 1940. She worked for Dilly Knox, of the Room 40 codebreaking unit, on the Italian Enigma machine, and by late March 1941, she effectively broke into the Italian’s framework, deciphering a message which said "Today's the day minus three." She and her colleagues worked for three days and nights to discover the Italians were intending to assault a Royal Navy convoy transporting supplies from Cairo in Egypt to Greece. The messages they deciphered provided detailed plans of the Italian assault. The Battle of Matapan became a decisive Allied victory over the Italian naval squadron. In December, 1941, she broke a message between Belgrade and Berlin leading to Knox’s team working out the wiring of Abwehr Enigma, an Enigma machine previously thought to be unbreakable. Then she broke the GGG Abwehr machine, enabling the British to read messages confirming the Germans believed the Double-Cross intelligence British double agents fed them. In 1942, she married fellow codebreaker Keith Batey. They had three children, and she pursued her interest in gardening history, publishing several books on the subject. She was a president of the Garden History Society, and became its Secretary in 1971. She was awarded the Veitch Memorial Medal in 1985, and made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 1987, officially for her work on the conservation of gardens. She died at age 92 in 2013.
- May 5, 1921 – Del Martin born, American feminist and gay rights activist; in 1955, with her partner Phyllis Lyon, founded the Daughters of Bilitis, the first social and political organization for lesbians in the U.S., and served as the organization’s first president and first editor of its magazine, The Ladder. Martin and Lyon were the first openly lesbian couple to join the National Organization for Women. Martin was politically active in San Francisco's first gay political organization, the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club, which influenced then-mayor Dianne Feinstein to sponsor a citywide bill to outlaw employment discrimination for gays and lesbians. She helped form the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, and was a participant in the White House Conference on Aging. Martin and Lyon married in 2004, the first same-sex marriage in San Francisco, after being life partners since 1952. In 2008, they remarried when California’s Supreme Court decision in In re Marriage Cases legalized same-sex marriage in California. Martin died two months after their second wedding from complications of an arm bone fracture at
age 87.
- May 5, 1922 – Irene Gut Opdyke born, Polish nurse who aided Jews persecuted by the Nazis during WWII; author of In My Hands, and honored as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem for risking her life to save 12 Jews from certain death.
- May 5, 1927 – Sylvia Fedoruk born, Canadian physicist, politician and athlete, Lieutenant Governor of Saskatchewan, first woman member of the Atomic Energy Control Board of Canada, former president of the Canadian Ladies Curling Association, member of the Canadian Curling Hall of Fame.
- May 5, 1937 – Delia Derbyshire born, English composer known for her electronic arrangement of the Doctor Who theme music.
- May 5, 1938 – Dr. Dorothy Hansine Andersen presents the results of her medical research, which identifies the disease Cystic Fibrosis, at a meeting of the American Pediatric Association.
- May 5, 1942 – Baroness Jean Corston born, British Labour politician, Member of Parliament (1992-2005); first woman Chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party (2001-2005); commissioned by the Home Office to write a report on vulnerable women in the UK’s criminal justice system, which outlined alternative thinking on sending mentally ill women to prison. Published as the Corston Report in 2007, it’s now the standard by which progress and improvements in the treatment of women by the UK prison and probation services are measured.
- May 5, 1945 – Diane Willcocks born, British academic, social science researcher, and administrator; advocate for more inclusive higher education; Vice-Chancellor of York St John University; Deputy Principal of Sheffield Hallam University; Director of Research at the University of North London. Appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2008.
- May 5, 1952 – Hafsat Abdulwaheed Ahmed born, Nigerian writer, poet, and women’s rights activist, first Hausa woman from Northern Nigeria to have her novel published. She is a member of Baobab, a Nigerian women’s rights group. When a Baobab delegation went to the governor of the state of Zamfara to express their disappointment that there were no women in his cabinet, he said there was no woman in Zambara educated enough to serve in his cabinet. “I thought that was an insult, because in my house alone my daughters were very educated.” Ahmed said, and added, 'Well, we are not only going to demand for the position of a commissioner, we are going to take away his seat. And I decided that I would contest the governor's seat in the next election." But her decision was greeted with an uproar, and her proposed candidacy was condemned by Muslim scholars, leading to the party on whose platform she wanted to contest denying her its backing, so her father prevailed on her to jettison the idea. Of the 30 books she has written, only five have been published, but her eldest daughter, Kadaria Ahmed, is a journalist, and founder of Daria Media Ltd, promoting public service journalism.
- May 5, 1984 – Johanna Hedva born, Korean American genderqueer contemporary artist and writer; noted for her 2015 lecture, “My Body Is a Prison of Pain so I Want to Leave It Like a Mystic But I Also Love It & Want it to Matter Politically” which became her “Sick Woman Theory” essay on chronic illness and the Western medical industry.
- May 5, 1988 – Adele born as Adele Blue Atkins, English singer-songwriter, one of the world’s best-selling music artists. She frequently performs at charity concerts for groups assisting people with learning disabilities, children with HIV/Aids, and raising funds to keep music programs in schools, and is a major contributor to MusicCares, which aids musicians in need.
- May 5, 1991 – International Day of the Midwife launched by the International Confederation of Midwives, now an observance on the United Nations calendar.
- May 5, 2017 – The National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Native Women and Girls is proposed in the U.S. House of Representatives, in memory of Hanna Harris, a Northern Cheyenne women who was murdered in 2013, and RoyLynn Rides Horse, a Crow woman, who died in 2016 after being beaten, burned, and left to die.
- May 5, 2019 – UN Women strongly concerned that the Court of Arbitration for Sport’s ruling on female athletes with naturally elevated levels of testosterone contravenes the international human rights norms and standards expressed in the United Nations Human Rights Council’s resolution of March 2019 on the ‘Elimination of Discrimination against Women and Girls in Sport.’ Indian sprinter Dutee Chand was the first to fight a case against the International Association of Athletics Federations’ (IAAF) hyperandrogenism rule and win. Now South African runner Caster Semenya has brought a case against the IAAF’s new limits on testosterone levels. The requirement for such athletes to medically reduce hormone levels in order to compete as women plays into a discriminatory and stereotyped equivalence between testosterone, masculinity, strength, and achievement that is challenged by medical doctors, human rights, and intersex advocates, with the scientific basis questioned. The proposed method of reduction and verification requires athletes to take additional hormones with potential negative side effects. This process can result in further human rights violations, just as previous invasive testing to determine the sex of female athletes has done.
- May 5, 2020 – UN Women Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka and Plan International CEO Anne-Birgitte Albrectsen issued a joint statement on the digital gender divide: “In low- and middle- income countries, 433 million women are not connected to the Internet, and 165 million fewer women own a mobile phone compared with men. Boys are 1.5 times more likely to own a phone than girls in many countries, and among those who do own phones, boys are more likely than girls to own smartphones. The global internet user gap is 17%, and the digital gender gap exists in all regions of the world — and continues to grow. No society is immune. Lockdown restrictions have left millions of girls, women, and people of all genders vulnerable to a growing shadow pandemic of violence — including cyberviolence and exploitation of children — and with limited access to help. For these people, technology can be a lifesaving line of defense, whether via instant messaging services with a geolocation function, free calls to domestic abuse hotlines, or discreet apps that provide disguised support and information to survivors in case of surveillance by abusers. But for those without access to a phone, these services might as well not exist. We must ensure that solutions do not only focus on high-end tech, further marginalizing girls and women without those resources. A two-pronged approach is needed: to assure full connectivity for everyone and to reach those who are not online. Governments and civil society can demand free or cheap access to the internet for those who cannot afford it, whether in the form of lower data-bundle costs, the waiving of caps and additional fees on data usage, or zero-rating important websites, such as those with key educational content. Service providers, too, need governments to provide a supportive regulatory environment to help maintain connectivity as demand surges. To achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and leave no one behind, we need digital literacy that does not discriminate. Giving girls and women access to digital resources, as well as the knowledge, training, and confidence to design and use them, will ensure that they are not further marginalized in an increasingly digital world.”
- May 5, 2021 – The Labour candidate for Mayor of West Yorkshire, Tracy Brabin, was investigated by West Yorkshire police after the Conservatives reported her, accusing her of “treating,” which is an offense under the Representation of the People Act 1983, which says a person is “guilty of treating if either before, during or after an election or referendum they directly or indirectly give or provide (or pay wholly or in part the expense of giving or providing) any food, drink, entertainment or provision in order to influence any voter to vote or refrain from voting.” However, police confirmed that she did not break electoral law by handing out brownies while campaigning, because she only gave the brownie boxes labeled “Vote Labour” to party members after canvassing, which is not against the rule. Brabin, a former cast member of the long-running television series Coronation Street, went on to be elected as West Yorkshire’s inaugural mayor with 59.8% of the vote, after second preference ballots were counted. Brabin is the first woman elected as a metro mayor in England, four years after the city-region roles were created. She will have powers over transport, crime, and planning in the region of 2.3 million people, which includes the cities of Leeds, Bradford, and Wakefield.
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- May 6, 1829 – Phebe Hanaford born, American Universalist minister, first Universalist woman ordained as a minister in New England, and the first woman chaplain to the Connecticut state legislature. She was an abolitionist, a feminist and member of the American Equal Rights Association, which campaigned for both Black and woman suffrage. Author of several non-fiction works, including Lucretia, the Quakeress, a biography of Lucretia Mott, and Life of Abraham Lincoln, the first biography of the president published after his death. She was on the Revising Committee, headed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, writing commentary on the Church of England’s Revised Version of the Bible, published in sections between 1881 and 1894, the first new English-language version of the Bible in over two centuries. The committee’s work led to Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s highly controversial two-part book, The Woman’s Bible, and Matilda Joslyn Gage’s book Woman, Church and State, which challenged traditional Judeo-Christian teachings that women were the source of sin, and that sex was sinful, contending the double standard for morality hurt both sexes.
- May 6, 1880 – Winifred Brunton born, British Egyptologist, painter, and illustrator; her portraits of Egyptian pharaohs were published in Kings and Queens of Ancient Egypt (1926).
- May 6, 1890 – Magdalena Sauer born, first South African woman to practice as a qualified architect; after earning a degree in science from the University of Cape Town in 1911, she became a trainee in architecture in Durban, and pursued further training in England at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. Sauer registered with the Institute of South African Architects in 1927, specializing in residential architecture and restoration. Noted for the 1960s restoration of the former Supreme Court building for its use as the South African Cultural History Museum, also the home of the Slave Lodge Museum since 1988.
- May 6, 1908 – Nancy Hale born, American novelist and short story writer; published over 80 short stories in the New Yorker, and won ten O. Henry Awards. Her 1942 novel, The Prodigal Women, was a best-seller. Hale’s work had been out-of-print for over 20 years, and largely forgotten, until seven of her short stories were published in the 2012 book Nancy Hale: On the Life & Work of a Lost American Master, with essays by critics on the importance and impact of her writing.
- May 6, 1915 – May Henriquez-Alvarez born, Curaçao-Dutch sculptor, writer, and translator of literary works and plays into and out of Papiamentu, the Portuguese-based creole language spoken in Curaçao. She published Yaya ta konta, a collection of original stories and served as chair of the Cultural Advisory Commission of Curaçao. She died at age 84 in 1999.
- May 6, 1922 – Gloria Hayes Richardson born, American civil rights leader; co-chair with Inez Grubb of the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee (CNAC), founded in 1962 in Cambridge, Maryland, the only affiliate of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that was not student-led. The CNAC picketed businesses which refused to hire black employees, then staged sit-ins at lunch counters which wouldn’t serve black customers. In 1963, Richardson and 80 other protesters were arrested. Maryland Governor J. Millard Tawes met with the protesters, but they rejected the deal he offered, and Tawes declared martial law, sending the National Guard to Cambridge. Protests continued until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The movement led to desegregation of all schools, recreational areas, and hospitals in Maryland, after the longest period of martial law within the United States since 1877. The Cambridge movement is often cited as the birth of the Black Power movement.
- May 6, 1929 – Dame Rosemary Cramp born, British archaeologist and specialist in Anglo-Saxon history; her Bachelor of Letters thesis concerned archaeological evidence’s connection to Old English poetry; fellow and tutor of English at St. Anne’s College, Oxford (1950-1955). She was Durham University Durham’s first woman professor, appointed to the Archaeology department (1971-1990); President of the Society of Antiquaries of London (2001-2004); appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2011.
- May 6, 1945 – Victoria Bond born, American conductor and composer; in January, 2022, Ruth Bader Ginsburg: In Tune With Justice, Bond’s work for narrator and orchestra, was premiered by the Stockton Symphony.
- May 6, 1947 – Martha Nussbaum born, American philosopher, author, feminist, and Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago; noted for The Fragility of Goodness and Sex and Social Justice.
- May 6, 1954 – Dora Bakoyannis born, Greek Democratic Alliance/New Democracy politician; member of Parliament (1989-2002); Minister for Culture (1992-1993); first woman Mayor of Athens (2003-2006); first woman Minister for Foreign Affairs (2006-2009); Chairperson-in-Office of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (2009); member of the Greek delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe since 2012.
- May 6, 1954 – Angela Hernández Nuñez born, Dominican author, poet, and feminist; member of Circulo de Mujeres Poetas (Circle of Women poets) and a founding member of the Grupo de Mujeres Creadoras (Group of Creative Women); books include El Peso de Rocío (The Weight of Dew) and Mudanza de los Sentidos (Change of Senses); awarded the Dominican National Literary Award in 1998.
- May 6, 1981 – Maya Lin’s design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is selected from 1,421 other entries.
- May 6-12, 1990 – The International Council of Nurses (ICN) started “International Nurse Day” on May 12, birthday of Florence Nightingale. In 199o, the American Nurses Association (ANA) expanded the recognition of nurses to a celebration of “National Nurses Week.”
- May 6, 2013 – Amanda Berry escapes with her daughter and contacts police. Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight, who all went missing in early 2000s, were believed dead. Ariel Castro was found guilty of keeping the women captive in his Cleveland, Ohio home, and sentenced to life plus 1,000 years in prison without parole, but committed suicide in his cell.
- May 6, 2017 – France bans too-thin fashion models and requires that digitally enhanced photos be labeled as enhanced.
- May 6, 2017 – Three years after being kidnapped by Boko Haram terrorists, 82 more Chibok schoolgirls were freed in Nigeria and safely transported to Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, the largest single release of the abducted girls. "We were told that Boko Haram was trying to negotiate for the release of some of their top commanders in custody of the Nigerian security services," Al Jazeera reported. A total of 276 girls were kidnapped and 113 remained missing.
- May 6, 2020 – Mallorca, a beautifully made eight-minute, black-and-white documentary with music by Spanish composer Isaac Albeñiz, was donated to Spain’s national film archive in 1982 by a man who ran a furniture storage business. His brother, a film producer, thought it might be of interest to the Filmoteca Española archive. For 38 years, Mallorca languished in the collection, wrongly identified as a silent 1926 film made by a male director. Then during the coronavirus lockdown, Filmoteca workers looking at the footage were struck by the director’s name: María Forteza. Josetxo Cerdán, head of the national archive, said: “The most surprising thing was seeing that a woman’s name came up as director.” Clues in the film allowed it to be tentatively dated between 1932 and 1934, but their search for Forteza proved frustrating. The film archives had no trace of her, although the film’s camera operator, Ramón Úbeda, was known for working in the Balearic Islands. Then Laura Jurado, a journalist for Industrias del Cine, a film website, uncovered the connection – María Forteza had been a singer and variety artist – and her husband was Ramón Úbeda. Cerdán wants the film definitively dated, because if it was made before 1935, then it is most likely the first talking picture directed by a Spanish woman, pre-dating Rosario Pi’s El gato montés (The Mountain Cat), made in 1935, which until now was believed to be first. He praised Mallorca as far better than most of the “aesthetic documentaries” of the period, which he said, “tend to be painfully dull: you get a monument, then another monument, then a mountain. But this isn’t like that. You have the explanatory prologue and the little narrative of the boat arriving on the island and then the tour. The camera is also very well positioned in every shot.” The discovery made headlines, but Cerdán said, “... the important thing we need to ask ourselves is why, in 2020, are there still women’s names we aren’t familiar with when it comes to film directing? What’s happened for it to be this way? Six weeks ago, we thought the history had all been written and that this would have been impossible.”
- May 6, 2021 – Celia Stubbs gave testimony at a public inquiry by judges, led by Sir John Mitting, into the conduct of over 139 undercover officers tasked with infiltrating political groups since 1968. Stubbs, who is now 80 years old, campaigned for decades to uncover the truth of how her partner, Blair Peach, died at an anti-racist demonstration in 1979. In one of the most controversial cover-ups in modern UK policing history, the Metropolitan police concealed until 2010 the report by an internal investigation immediately after Peach’s death that said it could “reasonably be concluded that a police officer” struck the blow to the head which killed him. Celia Stubbs and Peach’s family fought to gain access to that report for years. No officers were prosecuted over Peach’s death. Documents disclosed by the Mitting inquiry also confirmed that Scotland Yard spied for over two decades on Stubbs, Peach’s family, and other activists who joined her campaign for the truth. Police spies recorded names of people who attended Peach’s funeral. Photographs of attendees were circulated among the undercover officers in order to identify other mourners. Stubbs told the inquiry, “… while I was grieving the death of my partner and trying to campaign for justice for him, I was the subject of improper surveillance.” She accused police of “abusing their surveillance powers. They deployed them not to protect the public from harm but to protect themselves from facing justice. They wanted to know what I was doing and what others who were helping me were doing, with the obvious inference that they did so to ensure that they stayed one step ahead of our campaign to hold Blair’s killers to account.” The Mitting inquiry was launched after the Guardian newspaper ran a story about police covertly monitoring the campaign for justice over the racist killing of Stephen Lawrence, a black man murdered in an unprovoked racist attack by known gang members while waiting for a bus in Eltham, south London, in April 1993. An inquiry in 1999 into the Metropolitan Police’s investigation concluded that institutional racism contributed to the Met’s failure to bring the killers to justice. Two of Lawrence’s five attackers were finally convicted of his murder in 2012.
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- May 7, 160 AD? (exact year uncertain) – Julia Maesa born in Syria, Augusta (feminine form of Augustus, a Roman Imperial honorific title for prominent women of the imperial families). Politically able and ruthless, she contended for political power after her sister, Roman Empress Julia Domna, wife of Septimus Severus, committed suicide following the assassination of her son, Emperor Caracalla. Julia Maesa was ordered into exile in Emesa in Syria by the Praetorian prefect Macrinus, who usurped the throne. She used her immense wealth to gain support from soldiers stationed at a nearby military base, and launched a coup to put her 14-year-old grandson, Elagabalus, on the throne in place of the upstart Macrinus. But Elagabalus lavished favors on male courtiers, and caused so many sex scandals that Julia Maesa became part of the plot to assassinate him at age 18. He was replaced by her other grandson Severus Alexander, who ruled from 222 to 235, before being assassinated by his own army because he was trying diplomacy and bribes instead of warfare to deal with the Germanic and Sarmatian tribes crossing the Rhine and the Danube in hordes. The date of Julia Maesa’s death was not recorded, but she was deified in 227 AD.
- May 7, 1429 – Jeanne d'Arc (Joan of Arc), dubbed the “Maid of Orléans" because of this battle, is carried from the field, wounded between the neck and shoulder by an English arrow. The wound was stuffed with cotton to stop the bleeding, and after praying alone, she took up her banner, or it was carried forward by a soldier – there are conflicting stories - and the French soldiers, who had become discouraged by the Maid being wounded, took heart and surged against the bulwark. The key English position, les Tourelles, a turreted gatehouse at Orléans, was overrun by their renewed attack. Joan finally had her wound properly dressed that night. The English pulled their forces out of the siege lines the next day, which was a Sunday, and formed them up in battle line, but after a tense hour as the two armies faced each other without either side making an opening move, the English commanders regrouped their men into marching order, and headed toward their stronghold at Meung-sur-Loire. Joan urged that the English be allowed to leave without pursuit, so there would be no fighting on the Sabbath.
- May 7, 1748 – Olympe de Gouges born, French playwright, philosopher, feminist, and abolitionist. Her famous Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen (1791), a response to Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which she wrote after the petition for equal rights for women presented to the National Assembly by the participants in the Women’s March on Versailles was denied. She wrote: “This revolution will only take effect when all women become fully aware of their deplorable condition, and of the rights they have lost in society.” She also wrote over 70 pamphlets, advocating free speech, an end to slavery and oppression of the poor and marginalized, care for the elderly, institutions for homeless children, hostels for the unemployed, a woman’s right to divorce her husband, and the introduction of a jury system. Female political participation of all kinds was formally banned by the French National Assembly in 1793, after one of several uprisings led by women, and Olympe de Gouges became one of only three women sent to the guillotine for political activities during the Reign of Terror. Even while awaiting her execution, she smuggled out pamphlets condemning prison conditions, and challenged how the rights of free speech were embodied in the New Constitution. Executed for her political writings, “having forgotten the virtues that belong to her sex,” according to Pierre Gaspard Chaumette, President of the Paris Commune.
- May 7, 1818 – Juliet Opie Hopkins born on a slave-holding plantation; Confederate nurse. During the American Civil War, she coordinated civilian medical aid and donation efforts, oversaw converting tobacco factories into hospitals, and made daily visits to the wounded. While tending the wounded, she was wounded on the battlefield during the Battle of Seven Pines in 1862.
- May 7, 1845 – Mary Eliza Mahoney, one of the first African Americans to graduate from nursing school, and the first African American to work as a professionally trained nurse; co-founder with Adah B. Thoms of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses, which challenged racial discrimination in the registered nursing profession. The NACGN merged in 1951 with the American Nurses Association. Mahoney was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1993.
- May 7, 1909 – Dorothy Tabbyyetchy (‘Sunrise’) Lorentino born, Native American Comanche teacher. Dorothy Sunrise v. District Board of Cache Consolidated School District No. 1, became a landmark education judgment, allowing Native American children in Comanche County, Oklahoma, to attend public schools rather than the government-mandated Bureau of Indian Affairs Schools. Language from her case was incorporated into the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act. Her case predated a case allowing Native American children in California to attend public schools, and Brown v. Board of Education, which declared racial segregation of schools unconstitutional. She grew up to be a special education teacher, and taught ESL classes and students with disabilities for 34 years in schools in Arizona and Oregon, then retired to return home, where she taught the Comanche language and songs to tribal members. She was the first Native American and first Oklahoman to be inducted into the National Teachers Hall of Fame in 1997.
- May 7, 1927 – Ruth Prawer Jhabvala CBE, born in Germany to Jewish parents; her family was among the last to escape from the Nazi regime in 1939, immigrating to Britain. She lived in India with her husband (1951-1975), and moved to New York after his death. British-American author and screenwriter, winner of the 1975 Booker Prize for Heat and Dust, and two Academy Awards for Best Adapted Screenplay for Howard’s End and A Room With a View.
- May 7, 1936 – Aviator Amy Johnson set a new world record, flying from England to Cape Town, South Africa, in 3 days, 6 hours and 26 minutes. A women’s aviation pioneer, she was the first woman to fly solo. Johnson died while ferrying a plane for the Air Transport Auxiliary during WWII when she was caught in a snowstorm, and forced to parachute into the icy water of the Thames Estuary near Herne Bay in Kent in January 1941. Her body was never recovered.
- May 7, 1940 – Angela O. Carter born, English novelist, journalist, poet, and feminist; Nights at the Circus, The Magic Toyshop, Wise Children.
- May 7, 1954 – Joanna D. Haigh born, British physicist, meteorologist and academic; professor of Atmospheric Physics at Imperial College London, and co-director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment since 2014; noted for work on solar variability, radiative transfer, and stratosphere-troposphere climate modeling; Fellow of the Royal Society since 2013, and former president of the Royal Meteorological Society.
- May 7, 1954 – Amy Heckerling born, American film director, screenwriter, and producer; Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Look Who’s Talking and Clueless.
- May 7, 1956 – Anne Dudley born, English composer, conductor, and pop musician; member of the band Art of Noise, and an Academy Award winner for Best Original Score for The Full Monty.
- May 7, 1957 – Kristina M. Johnson born, American executive, optical engineer, and academic; appointed as U.S. Department of Energy Under Secretary (2009-2010); developed an integrated Strategic Technologies Energy Plan for reducing U.S. dependence on imported oil by 75%, achieving greenhouse gas reductions of 83% by 2050, and achieving 80% low-carbon electricity by 2035. A leader in developing optoelectronic processing systems and 3-D imaging. Co-founder of the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center, and State University of New York chancellor; advocate for women in leadership, science, and engineering; first woman awarded the International Dennis Gabor Award for creativity in modern optics in 1993, and recipient of the John Fritz Medal for engineering; in 2015 elected to the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and in 2016 to the National Academy of Engineering.
- May 7, 1961 – Dame Sue Black born, Scottish forensic anthropologist, anatomist, and author; Professor of Anatomy and Forensic Anthropology at the University of Dundee (2005-2018); Pro Vice-Chancellor for Engagement at Lancaster University beginning in August 2018; co-author of Disaster Victim Identification: The Practitioner’s Guide, and Age Estimation in the Living: The Practitioners Guide.
- May 7, 1962 – Judith S. Donath born, American computer scientist; fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center; founder of the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab. She combines concepts from evolutionary biology, architecture, ethnography, and cognitive science in developing and optimizing designs of mediated virtual cities on the internet; Inhabiting the Virtual City.
- May 7, 1983 – Phionah Atuhebwe born, Ugandan vaccinologist and immunization expert; Vaccines Introduction Medical Officer, Africa at the World Health Organization (WHO). She graduated with a Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (M.B.B.S), Medicine and Surgery; earned a Master of International Public Health/International Health from University of Leeds; studied Project Leadership and Management at Cornell University, and Vaccinology at University of Cape Town. Atuhebwe heads the WHO Regional Office for Africa in Brazzaville, Congo. Recognized as one of Africa's biggest contributors to the continent's immunization programmes, she coordinates financial support, planning, and implementation of new vaccination activities in the region, and oversees allocation of new vaccine doses to priority countries. In April, 2020, she contracted Covid-19 while fighting the virus on the frontlines, but recovered, and returned to work.
- May 7, 2019 – A new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says too many American women still die from pregnancy-related causes, some up to a year after delivery. About 700 pregnancy-related deaths occur in the United States each year, and 3 out of 5 are preventable. Nearly 31% of the deaths happen during pregnancy, and another 36% occur during delivery or the week after. But a full third of deaths happen up to a year after a woman gives birth, the CDC found. For the study, the CDC analyzed national data on pregnancy-related deaths between 2011 and 2015, and more detailed data from 13 states gathered between 2013 and 2017. The CDC defines pregnancy-related death as one occurring within a year of the pregnancy's end. The cause could be a related complication, a chain of events initiated by pregnancy, or the aggravation of an unrelated medical condition by pregnancy. Heart disease and stroke caused about 1 in 3 deaths, and other leading causes included infections and severe blood loss. Women died because they lacked access to good health care, resulting in delayed or missed diagnosis of crucial medical problems. Serious racial disparities exist. Black and American Indian/Alaska Native women were about three times as likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause as white women. "Our new analysis underscores the need for access to quality services, risk awareness, and early diagnosis, but also highlights opportunities for preventing future pregnancy-related deaths," said Dr. Wanda Barfield, director of the Division of Reproductive Health in CDC's National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. "By identifying and promptly responding to warning signs not just during pregnancy, but even up to a year after delivery, we can save lives."
- May 7, 2020 – In Washington DC, nurses protested across from the White House over a lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) for health care workers on the coronavirus pandemic frontlines. Nurses with National Nurses United carried signs saying “PROTECT Nurses, Patients, Public Health” and placed 88 pairs of white shoes on the path in Lafayette Square, each pair representing a nurse lost due inadequate PPE while fighting Covid-19. The demonstrators also read the names of their fallen colleagues. Jean Ross, president of NNU, said: "You talk about how essential, how needed, how grateful you are, and yet you throw us to the wolves. You throw us out onto a battlefield without armor and the more we complain we don't see anything being done.”
- May 7, 2021 – British-American actress Emily Mortimer is known for her performances in Lovely and Amazing, Match Point, Chaos Theory, and the HBO series The Newsroom, but adapted screenplay writer and television director are now on her resume. Mortimer’s three-part miniseries The Pursuit of Love, based on the 1945 novel by Nancy Mitford, debuted on BBC One. Mortimer says Mitford “deals with things like a mother rejecting her baby. Shellshock from the war. Physical abuse in families. Xenophobia … All of these things but in a way that is so funny, and, I don’t know, more effective somehow.” When she reread the novel, she was struck by “how radical it still feels about women.”
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- May 8, 1865 – Dr. Mary Harris Thompson opened the Chicago Hospital for Women and Children because neither of the two existing hospitals in Chicago allowed women on staff, and one didn’t allow women patients. Thompson initially opened the hospital to treat widows and orphans of the Civil War.
- May 8, 1903 – Mary Henderson Stewart born, Baroness Stewart of Alvechurch; British Labour politician and educator; served in the Women’s Auxillary Air Force (WAAF) during WWII; magistrate in the juvenile courts, and later chair of the East London Juvenile Court; created a life peer and House of Lords member in 1975.
- May 8, 1908 – Francine Andre Agazarian born in France, served as a courier for Prosper network of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) in and around Paris during WWII, from March 1943 until June 1943, when word of the Germans being close to breaking the network caused her and other members of Proser to be airlifted back to Britain. Her husband Jack Agazarian also worked for the SOE, but he was captured, tortured, kept in solitary confinement, and then executed in 1945. Francine Agazarian was Mentioned in Dispatches, and her husband was posthumously awarded the Légion d'honneur and Croix de Guerre. She never remarried, and died in London at age 85 in 1998.
- May 8, 1910 – Mary Lou Williams born, jazz composer, became piano chair and writer for Benny Goodman (1931), wrote “The Zodiac Suite” for jazz ensemble, played it at New York’s Town Hall (1945).
- May 8, 1914 – President Woodrow Wilson signed a proclamation designating the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day – but he barely gave lip service to woman suffrage, in spite of his daughter, Jessie Woodrow Wilson Sayre, being an ardent suffragist. His attitude went through several changes before he gave a speech before Congress on September 30, 1918, publicly endorsing women’s right to vote.
- May 8, 1918 – Alix D’Unienville born in Mauritius; her family moved back to France when she was six. Field agent and resistance operative in the Free French (RF) section of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) during WWII. She began her SOE training in June 1943, at the special training schools at Beaulieu. In March 1944, she parachuted into Loir-et-Cher carrying millions in francs for distribution. Her cover story was she was born on the island of Réunion in 1922, moved to France in 1938 to study, and was now the wife of a prisoner of war. She worked successfully in Paris until she was arrested in June 1944, and taken Gestapo headquarters where she was interrogated, and a search found her cyanide pill. She was held in Fresnes prison in solitary confinement. She pretended to be mentally ill to escape from Fresnes and to be transferred to Saint-Anne hospital. This plan was foiled by the Gestapo, who transferred her to La Pitié, a place associated with brutal atrocities of the Gestapo. D'Unienville, by once again eating and talking, was able to get herself transferred briefly to Saint-Anne, and then to the prison camp at Romainville, where she and another woman, Annie Hervé, hatched a plan to escape over the walls using a rope they made out of black curtains. The attempt was abandoned when Hervé was deported to Germany. D’Unienville was in the last convoy from Romainville to Germany. She was able to escape when the prisoners were sent across a road bridge over the Marne because the rail bridge was destroyed by Allied bombing. She hid in two villages before being liberated by the Americans, and was able to return to Paris. After the war, D'Unienville was employed as a war correspondent for U.S. forces in southeast Asia before she worked as an air hostess for Air France and became a writer of fiction and nonfiction. She died in Paris at age 97 in 2015.
- May 8, 1927 – Nora Marks Dauenhauer born, Tlinglit poet, short-story writer, and scholar of Alaska’s Tlingit nation language and traditions. Won an American Book Award for Russians in Tlingit America: The Battles of Sitka, 1802 and 1804.
- May 8, 1929 – Ethel D. Allen born, African American physician and Republican politician; described herself as a ‘ghetto practitioner” and made house calls in some of the poorest neighborhoods in Philadelphia. Concerned about the crime she saw daily, she ran for the Philadelphia City Council, and won after out-performing the incumbent in series of debates. She was the first black woman on the city council (serving the Fifth District 1972-1976, and then as an At-Large member 1976-1979); appointed as Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (1979). She died in 1981 from complications after double-bypass heart surgery.
- May 8, 1929 – Miyoshi Umeki born in Japan, Japanese-American actress and singer; first Asian and first Asian woman to win an Academy Award for acting, for her supporting role as Katsumi in Sayonara; also originated the role of Mei Li in Flower Drum Song on Broadway and in the 1961 film; operated a business with her husband renting editing equipment to film studios and college film departments.
- May 8, 1932 – Julieta Campos born, Cuban-Mexican novelist, translator and politician; appointed as Secretary of Tourism for the Government of Mexico City in 2000; noted for El miedo de perder a Euridíce (The Fear of Losing Eurydice).
- May 8, 1943 – Pat Barker born, English novelist; her book Union Street, interlinked stories of seven working class women, was rejected by publishers as “too depressing” until she submitted it to the feminist publisher Virago; noted for her historical novels in The Regeneration Trilogy about the aftermath of trauma for British soldiers in the Great War, and her re-telling of the Trojan War, The Silence of the Girls.
- May 8, 1945 – Janine Haines born, Australian Democratic politician, the second Leader of the Australian Democrats in Parliament, and first woman to be a federal parliamentary leader of an Australian political party (1986-1990); Australian Democrats Deputy Leader (1985-1986); Senator for South Australia (1981-1990); author of Suffrage to Sufferance: One Hundred Years of Women in Politics, published in 1992, which is a prescribed text in many Australian universities and schools. She died in 2004 from a degenerative neurological condition, and was honoured with a state funeral.
- May 8, 1946 – Estonian schoolgirls Aili Jõgi (age 14) and Ageeda Paavel (age 15) blew up a wooden Soviet memorial erected in front of the Bronze Soldier of Tallinn, protesting the Soviet occupation authorities’ systematic destruction of memorials to the fallen of the 1918-1920 Estonian War of Independence, even the gravestones of the Tallinn Military Cemetery. They were apprehended, and sent to forced-labor camps in the USSR, but finally released after years of hardship and returned home. In 1998, they became the only Estonian women awarded the Order of the Cross of the Eagle, as “freedom fighters of military merit.”
- May 8, 1964 – Melissa Gilbert born, American actress, television producer-director; best known as child star of television’s Little House on the Prairie (1973-1984). Gilbert was President of the Screen Actors Guild (2001-2005). She is active in Democratic politics.
- May 8, 1967 – Viviana Durante born, English-trained Italian ballet dancer; Director of Dance at the English National Ballet School. She was a principal dancer with The Royal Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, and Teatro alla Scala.
- May 8, 1970 – Naomi Klein born, Canadian nonfiction author, environmental and anti-capitalism activist; noted for No Logo; The Shock Doctrine; This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate; and On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal. In 2016, she was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize for her climate justice activism.
- May 8, 1975 – Jodhi May born as Jodhi Hakin-Edwards, British actress and filmmaker; youngest recipient at age 12 of the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival for 1988’s A World Apart. Also known for her performances in The Last of the Mohicans and A Quiet Passion. In addition to her film roles, she works frequently in television and theatre in the UK. In 2002, she wrote and directed the short film Spyhole.
- May 8, 1977 – Kathrin Bringmann born, German number theorist, noted for substantial contributions to the theory of mock theta functions; she was the Emmy Noether Lecturer of the German Mathematical Society in 2015.
- May 8, 1988 – Carola Rackete born, German ship captain who volunteered with the sea rescue organisation Sea-Watch. Rackete served for two years as a navigation officer on scientific expeditions in the Arctic and the Antarctic for the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research. She later worked as second-officer on ships owned by Greenpeace and the British Antarctic Survey. As captain of SeaWatch3, on June 12, 2019, she and her crew rescued a group of migrants off the Libyan coast who were fleeing the battles between the Libyan National Army and the Government of National Accord. Italy closed its ports to migrant rescue ships on June 14, but ten of the migrants – pregnant women, children, and those who were ill – were allowed to disembark. On June 28, Finland, France, Germany, Luxembourg, and Portugal offered to take the migrants. On June 29, Rackete was arrested for docking the ship without authorization in the port of Lampedusa, Italy, the nearest safe harbor per martitime law. Right-wing Italian interior minister Matteo Salvini accused Rackete of trying to sink an Italian patrol boat that was trying to intercept her which her ship collided with, calling the incident an act of war. The German government protested the arrest. Rackete was kept under house arrest, and investigated for possible criminal activities involving undocumented migrants, facing charges which carried up to 15 years in prison. She was released from house arrest after a court ruling that she had broken no laws and had acted to protect passengers' safety, and in January 2020, on appeal, the Italian Supreme Court of Cassation ruled that she should never have been arrested.
- May 8, 1999 – Nancy Macy became the first female cadet to graduate from The Citadel, the formerly all-male military school in South Carolina.
- May 8, 2013 – The first World Ovarian Cancer Day. Ovarian cancer is responsible for 140,000 deaths annually. Statistics show that 45% of women with ovarian cancer are likely to survive for five years compared to about 89% of women with breast cancer.
- May 8, 2018 – Women held strikes and demonstrations around the world calling for gender equality and empowerment to mark International Women's Day. Spanish women launched a 24-hour strike against gender violence and the wage gap, while demonstrators filled streets in New Delhi and Seoul. The recent #MeToo and Time's Up movements, raising awareness of rampant sexual harassment and assault across all industries, energized the events. Margrethe Vestager, European competition commissioner, tweeted a call for women and men alike to "engage," saying, "We need power to make equality a reality." Farida Nabourema, a rights advocate from the West African nation of Togo, tweeted support for all female activists "being abusively detained by dictatorial governments."
- May 8, 2018 – Mississippi's House approved a bill to bar women from having abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Already passed by the state’s Senate, it was signed by Republican Governor Phil Bryant, who stated,. "I want Mississippi to be the safest place in America for an unborn child." Abortion-rights groups denounced the bill, and the state's lone clinic still providing abortions challenged it in court, noting that courts have never upheld a law barring abortions before the 20-week viability marker, where a fetus could possibly survive outside the uterus. "We certainly think this bill is unconstitutional," said Katherine Klein, equality advocacy coordinator for the American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi. Mississippi’s laws already severely restricted access, with tight restrictions on ACA insurance coverage and State Medicaid funding, parental permission required for minors unless the minor’s petition to the courts for a waiver is successful; and all patients required to wait 24 hours between receiving state-mandated counseling and obtaining an abortion.
- May 8, 2019 – In the UK, teenager Isabelle Holdaway’s cystic fibrosis had left her with less than a third of normal lung capacity by 2017. She nearly died after a lung transplant, from an intractable infection unaffected by antibiotics. After a nine-month stay at Great Ormond Street hospital, she returned to her Kent home for palliative care, but her consultant, Dr. Helen Spencer, teamed up with a U.S. laboratory to develop an experimental therapy. Jo Holdaway, Isabelle’s mother, who made the initial suggestion of phage therapy after reading about it online, said her daughter was “the luckiest child on earth” to have received the treatment in time. “It’s incredible medical science. It’s been a miracle,” she said. Professor Graham Hatfull of the University of Pittsburgh spent over thirty years amassing a collection of phages, and agreed to help find a treatment for Isabelle. Phages work by infecting bacteria cells and killing them, but they are very specific in the infections they target. Hatfull and colleagues identified dozens of phages known to infect bacterial relatives of the patient’s strains, and tested thousands of combinations of them in petri dishes to see which wiped out the patient’s bacteria. Each experiment took a week because the bacteria grow slowly. In 2018, shortly after Isabelle was sent home, Hatfull’s lab identified a phage that wiped out the infection, and another two phages that could infect it but not kill it efficiently. By removing a single gene, they were able to increase the efficiency of these two phages, making a cocktail that they believed could kill the infection. A combination was used to avoid the infection becoming resistant to a single phage. In June 2018, Isabelle returned to Great Ormond Street, and after some safety tests, was given the cocktail twice daily via an intravenous drip and on her skin. Six weeks later a liver scan revealed the infection had essentially disappeared. There were almost no side effects. Hatfull said: “We didn’t think we’d ever get to a point of using these phages therapeutically. It’s a brilliant outcome.” As of May, 2019, Isabelle was still on the treatment, but has made a slow, steady recovery. All but one of her skin nodules has cleared. She returned to school, studied for A-levels, started a part-time job, and learned to drive. Dr. Spencer said: “The bigger question is whether it could be used to treat other resistant bacteria.” Finding the right phages for each patient is a big challenge. In the future, scientists hope it may be possible to conduct automated searches of phage libraries to identify personalised treatments. Some infections, such as the hospital superbug Staphylococcus aureus, are known to be genetically homogeneous enough that a few phages might be able to treat almost all strains of the infection, raising the prospect of phage therapy becoming routine. “We’re sort of in uncharted territory,” Professor Hatfull said.
- May 8, 2020 – Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, Lucie Oldale became sole caretaker of the Eden Project in Cornwall in South West England. A specialist horticulturalist, she works among over 1,000 species in the huge biome housing the world’s largest indoor rainforest, with only lizards, birds, and insects as company. “It’s quite a bizarre experience,” said Oldale, age 32. “Usually at this time of year it’s really busy with visitors. Now it’s just me.” She says she misses the crowds of visitors but, “I’m so privileged to have this brilliant space to myself with all the plants doing their thing, no matter what humans are up to outside. Spring is a beautiful time of year in the rainforest. The plants are enjoying high light levels and longer days. Everything is bursting into life.”
- May 8, 2021 – In the UK, Angela Rayner, who was Labour’s election campaigns chief, was fired as campaigns chief and Labour’s chair by the party’s leader Keir Starmer, in a bitter round of blame-assigning following Labour’s disastrous performance in the May 6 elections. Several Labour MPs pointed out that Rayner, a former care assistant and union rep originally from Stockport, was chosen for her role because of her appeal to working-class communities in northern England. Former shadow chancellor John McDonnell said the decision to remove Rayner as Labour’s chair and campaigns chief was a “cowardly avoidance of responsibility.” Meanwhile, senior Labour figures blamed the election fiasco on failure to understand how Boris Johnson changed the Tory party’s image to appeal to working-class voters. One frontbencher said: “I kept getting briefing notes telling me to say ‘same old Tories.’ The problem is that they are not the same old Tories. They are different and we didn’t get that.”
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The Feminist Cats learn about two
Nursing Trailblazers (and Cat Lovers)
during Women’s Health Care Month
.
Clara Barton became world-famous as “the Angel of the Battlefield” for her work during and after the U.S. Civil War with wounded soldiers and their families. In 1870, she went to Switzerland to learn about the newly created International Red Cross. There, she was introduced to Antoinette Margot, a young French woman from a well-off family in Lyons who was a talented painter, but joined the Red Cross to help with the sick and wounded during the Franco-Prussian War. They traveled together to the front, a horrific experience for the young woman. Years later, Barton wrote: “Antoinette Margot … went with me every step of the way; over broken ranks, through fire and blood, and both came out alive, God knows how.”
After the war, Margot became Barton’s assistant in London and Paris, helping to organize relief efforts, but continuing to paint in her few leisure hours. She painted this portrait of Clara Barton’s cat Tommy.
In 1873, Barton returned to America, but Margot went home to Lyon, where she was frustrated by going back to being a dependent of her strict parents. She converted to Roman Catholicism, and devoted herself to caring for the poor.
In 1885, Barton wrote to her, asking Margot to come work with her in America, but their relationship grew strained – Barton was often away on speaking and fundraising tours, and Margot felt isolated and confused by America’s different customs. So she resigned, and used money her father advanced from her inheritance to build an art school in the Brookland neighborhood of Washington DC, near the newly opened Catholic University.