“… the right to terminate a pregnancy arose straight
out of the right to purchase and use contraception.
In turn, those rights led, more recently, to rights of
same-sex intimacy and marriage. They are all part
of the same constitutional fabric, protecting
autonomous decision making over the
most personal of life decisions.”
– Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and
Stephen Breyer, dissenting opinion in
Dobbs v Women’s Health Organization
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WOW2 is a four-times-a-month sister blog
to This Week in the War On Women
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“You cannot be neutral. You must either
join with us who believe in the bright
future or be destroyed by those who
would return us to the dark past.”
– Daisy Elizabeth Adams Lampkin,
African-American suffragist, civil rights
activist, and community practitioner
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“Women have waited 232 years to be
enshrined as full and equal citizens.
Why? Because, in 1787, women were
left out of the Constitution intentionally.”
–from Patricia Arquette’s statement
at the House Judiciary Committee’s
April 2019 hearings on the
Equal Rights Amendment
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The purpose of WOW2 is to learn about and honor women of achievement, including many who’ve been ignored or marginalized in most of the history books, and to mark events in women’s history.
These trailblazers have a lot to teach us about persistence in the face of overwhelming odds. I hope you will find reclaiming our past as much of an inspiration as I do.
THIS WEEK IN THE WAR ON WOMEN
will post shortly, so be sure to go there next, and
catch up on the latest dispatches from the frontlines.
Many, many thanks to libera nos, intrepid Assistant Editor of WOW2. Any remaining mistakes are either mine, or uncaught computer glitches in transferring the data from his emails to DK5. And much thanks to wow2lib, WOW2’s Librarian Emeritus.
Note: All images and audios are below the person or event to which they refer.
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- August 9, 1757 – Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton born, daughter of a Continental Army General from a wealthy and politically influential Dutch heritage family; she accompanied her father to a meeting of the Six Nations, and met Benjamin Franklin when he stayed at the Schuyler family home. She married Alexander Hamilton, helping with his political articles and correspondence, serving as an intermediary with his publisher, and frequently hosting and attending political and social dinners. Her husband’s sudden death in the 1804 duel with Aaron Burr, left her a widow with seven children, and many debts to pay, so she sold their estate, The Grange. In 1806, she and several other women founded the Orphan Asylum Society, opening the first private orphanage in New York. She was its second vice president, and became its directress (1821-1848). The New York Orphan Society is now Graham Windham, an agency providing services to over 4500 children and families affected by abuse and neglect in low income New York neighborhoods.
- August 9, 1762 – Mary Randolph born, American author of The Virginia Housewife, an influential domestic “how-to” book. She is the first recorded person buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
- August 9, 1861 – Dorothea Klumpke born, American astronomer and astrophotographer, one of the five Klumpke sisters, who all went on to distinguished careers, two in music, one in art, and another in medicine. Dorothea began work at the Paris Observatory in 1887, measuring star positions, processing astrophotographs, and studying stellar spectra; she was chosen as the observatory’s Director of the Bureau of Measurements (1895-1901) over 50 male applicants. She worked on astrophotography for the atlas of the heavens proposed by Sir David Gill in 1886, but left Paris in 1901 when she married Welsh astronomer Dr. Isaacs Roberts, and assisted in a British project to photograph 52 of the Herschel “areas of nebulosity.” Sadly, her husband died in 1904, but she inherited all his astronomical equipment and considerable fortune. She later returned to the Paris Observatory, working on plates and notes from her husband’s years of work; in 1929, she published “The Isaac Roberts Atlas of 52 Regions, a Guide to William Herschel’s Fields of Nebulosity.” She was awarded the Hèléne-Paul Helbronner prize in 1932 from the French Academy of Sciences for this publication.
- August 9, 1865 – Janie Porter Barrett born to a former slave; American welfare worker, reformer, and educator; founded the Locust Street Social Settlement, the first Black settlement house in the U.S. She also founded the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls, a pioneer in rehabilitation of African-American female delinquents, now the Barrett Learning Center.
- August 9, 1867 – Evelina Haverfield born, Scottish nurse and woman suffrage activist; member (1908-1915) of the WSPU, Emmeline Pankhurst’s militant suffrage organization; during the Second Boer War in South Africa (1899-1902), she set up a retirement camp for horses; founder of the Women’s Emergency Corps to train women as WWI nurses, motorcycle messengers, and mechanics. In 1915, Haverfield went as a nurse to Serbia, and raised money for Serbian relief (1915-1916). After the war, she and Vera Holme set up an orphanage in Bajina Bašta in western Serbia.
- August 9, 1878 – Eileen Gray born in Ireland, architect and furniture designer based in Paris; a pioneer of the Modern Movement in architecture; noted for her design of E-1027, a holiday home near Monaco, and Tempe à Pailla (‘Time and Hay’), a smaller home in Menton, also on the Côte d’Azur. During WWII, while she was interned as a foreign national, the Nazis looted the houses she designed, which were damaged by bombing, and E-1027 was used for target practice by German soldiers.
- August 9, 1883 – Daisy Elizabeth Adams Lampkin born, African American suffragist, civil rights activist, and community practitioner. She was a fundraiser, public speaker, and organizer for the National Association of Colored Women (NACW- later chair of its national board). By 1912, she was a leader in women’s clubs in the Pittsburgh area, and a close friend and colleague of Mary McLeod Bethune. After passage of the 19th Amendment, she focused her considerable talents on civic issues and civil rights. She served as Chair of the Allegheny County Negro Women's Republican League, vice-Chair of the Negro Voters League of Pennsylvania and vice-Chair of the Colored Voters Division of the Republican National Committee. In Pittsburgh, she established the first Red Cross chapter among black women and organized local chapters of both the Urban League and NAACP. She also became stockholder and vice-president of the Pittsburgh Courier, to publicize social justice causes and events. Her work as writer, editor, and executive helped make the paper the top African-American-run circulating paper during the 1950s. In 1924, she was the only woman among the black leaders who met with President Calvin Coolidge at the White House to discuss racial equality. In 1930, she was the first regional Field Secretary for the NAACP, and organized their 1931 national convention in Pittsburg, then was promoted in 1935 to National Field Secretary. She lobbied in Washington for a federal anti-lynching bill, and recruited a young Baltimore attorney named Thurgood Marshall to join the NAACP's Legal Defense Committee in 1938. She resigned as National Field Secretary in 1947, but continued to serve on the NAACP executive board. She suffered a stroke while at a NAACP membership drive in Camden, New Jersey, and died at age 81 in March 1965.
- August 9, 1908 – Mary G. Ross born, American Cherokee engineer and mathematician with a fascination for astronomy, the first Native American woman engineer. She was hired in 1942 by Lockheed as a mathematician, and worked with the engineering staff on the P-38 Lightning fighter plane, the first aircraft to exceed 400 mph; after the war, Lockheed sent her to UCLA for professional certification in engineering, where she studied aeronautics, missiles, and celestial mechanics. Ross was one of the few women kept on after the war – most were laid off so their jobs could go to men returning home from military service. In 1952, she joined Lockheed’s Advanced Development Program at the then-secret ‘Skunk Works’ working on preliminary design concepts for manned and unmanned earth-orbiting flights and satellites, interplanetary space travel, and the RM-81 Agena rocket project. She was a co-author of the NASA Planetary Flight Handbook Volume III, about space travel to Mars and Venus. By 1958, she was ranked as an advanced systems engineer. Ross worked on the U.S. ballistic missile system, overcoming the problems with launching them from submarines, and the Polaris reentry vehicle. She joined the Society of Women Engineers and the American Indian Science and Engineering Society. After she retired in 1973, actively recruited Native Americans and women for engineering careers.
- August 9, 1915 – Mareta West born, American geologist, first woman geologist hired by the U.S. Geological Survey, in Arizona; became the first woman astrogeologist as the only woman on the Geology Experiment Team for Apollo 11. She chose the site for the first manned lunar landing.
- August 9, 1919 – Leona Woods Marshall Libby born, physicist, only woman on the team that built the world’s first nuclear reactor, and also worked on the Manhattan Project.
- August 9, 1940 – Linda Keen born, American mathematician and professor at Lehman College and at the Graduate Center (1974-2017), both of the City University of New York. Did work on Riemann surfaces, hyperbolic geometry, Kleinian and Fuchsian groups, and complex analysis; president of the Association for Women in Mathematics (1985-1986); a fellow of the American Mathematical Society since 2012.
- August 9, 1944 – Patricia McKissack born, prolific African American children’s and historical fiction writer, many co-authored with her husband Frederick; won three Coretta Scott King Awards for A Long Hard Journey: The Story of the Pullman Porter; Dark-Thirty: Southern Tales of the Supernatural; and Christmas in the Big House, Christmas in the Quarters.
- August 9, 1952 – Prateep Ungsongtham Hata born in a Bangkok slum, Thai activist and politician; opened a school in her home for children too poor to pay regular school fees. A newspaper story about her school led to donations, and university students volunteering as teachers. The Bangkok Metropolitan Administration gave her school official recognition in 1976, and she was honored in 1978 with the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service. In 2000, she was elected as Bangkok’s representative to the Thai Senate. In 2004, she received The World’s Children’s Prize for the Rights of the Child from Queen Silvia of Sweden. After the coup d’état in Thailand 2006, she supported the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship (“Red Shirts”). During the protests of 2010, she belonged to the more moderate wing of the movement and was concerned to see the militant tendencies within the group. The political polarisation in Thailand impacted her Duang Prateep Foundation, as some regular Thai donors who were affiliated with the opposite political camp stopped their payments.
- August 9, 1964 – Hoda Kotb born, Egyptian American television journalist and author; regular on Today, NBC’s morning show since 2008, and replaced Matt Lauer after he was fired in 2018. Dateline NBC correspondent (1998-2007); author or co-author of several books, including her 2010 best-selling autobiography, Hoda: How I Survived War Zones, Bad Hair, Cancer, and Kathie Lee.
- August 9, 1982 – Yekaterina Samutsevich born, Russian political activist and musician, member of the anti-Putin punk rock group Pussy Riot; convicted in 2012 of ‘hooliganism motivated by religious hatred’ for an appearance at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, and sentenced to two years imprisonment. The Union of Solidarity with Political Prisoners and Amnesty International launched international campaigns to free her. On appeal, her sentence was suspended after her lawyer argued that she was stopped by cathedral guards before she could get her guitar out of its case.
- August 9, 1990 – Sarah McBride born, American transgender rights activist, author, and Democratic politician; Delaware state senator since 2021; former national press secretary of the Human Rights Campaign. In 2018, published her book, Tomorrow Will Be Different: Love, Loss, and the Fight for Trans Equality. She was the first openly transgender person to address a major party convention, the 2016 Democratic National Convention; in 2013, she was a major influence in passage of legislation in Delaware banning discrimination on the basis of gender identity.
- August 9, 1995 – Roberta Cooper Ramo becomes first woman president of the American Bar Association.
- August 9, 1995 – In South Africa, National Women’s Day becomes a public holiday to celebrate the 1956 Women’s March on the Union Buildings of Pretoria. Over 2,000 women of all races protested against the Urban Areas Act of 1950 amendments, a law requiring all South Africans defined as “black” to carry an internal passport that served to maintain segregation, control urbanization, and manage migrant labor during apartheid. The protest was led by Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, Rahima Moosa, and Sophia Williams. They left 14,000 petitions with 100,000 signatures at the office doors of the prime minister, and held a 30 minute silent vigil. After the vigil, they sang the song “Wathint’Abafazi Wathint’imbokodo” (“Now you have touched the women, you have struck a rock”).
- August 9, 2019 – Carolyn Tuft survived the 2007 mass shooting at the Trolley Square mall in Salt Lake City, but her 15-year-old daughter Kirsten was killed. Tuft has lead poisoning from 300 shotgun pellets still in her body, leaving her with debilitating headaches, nausea, and other serious health problems. Unable to work, she lost her home and her business. She responded to the August 2019 mass shootings in El Paso TX, which killed 23 and injured 23 others, and in Dayton OH, where 9 died and 17 were wounded: “I feel for them because I know that their journey ahead is a rough, rough journey.”
- August 9, 2021 – A year after massive protests in Belarus challenging the nation’s authoritarian president Alexander Lukashenko over election fraud, opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya recalls from her exile in Vilnius, Lithuania: “People were in a state of euphoria. We also thought: look how many of us there are, there’s no chance the regime can remain in power. Probably we weren’t ready for this level of cruelty.” In the year since, 35,000 Belarusians were jailed, hundreds were tortured, and thousands more forced by Lukashenko’s ruthless crackdown to flee the county. Over 600 political prisoners are now under house arrest, and critics in exile are hounded. Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya has focused on rallying international support for the opposition and for tougher sanctions against Lukashenko. She has met with Joe Biden, and with Boris Johnson. As a statesperson-in-exile, she says, “I think that people have put too much responsibility on me. People are forgetting that a year ago I was just a mother, not at all involved in politics. I have had to study a lot and I’m trying to do what I can, where I am … But the responsibility isn’t just on me, it’s on all Belarusians.”
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- August 10, 1858 – Anna Julia Haywood Cooper born into slavery in North Carolina, American Black liberation activist, scholar, author, educator, and lecturer. In 1868, at age 9, she received a scholarship to the new Saint Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute, founded by the Episcopal diocese in Raleigh to train teachers to educate former slaves. She distinguished herself as a bright and ambitious student who did well in all subjects. In spite of a two-track system, which relegated females to lower level courses, Cooper fought for and earned her right to take the more demanding courses designed for the men. She tutored younger children to help pay her expenses, then stayed on as an instructor after completing her studies. She taught classics, rhetoric, history, higher English, and music. Her marriage to George Cooper, a fellow student, ended when he died two years later. She went to Oberlin College in Ohio, earning a BA in 1884. Mary Church Terrell and Ida Gibbs Hunt were classmates. She taught at Wilberforce College and St. Augustine’s, then returned to Oberlin to earn an MA in Mathematics in 1888. Her book, A Voice from the South: by a Woman of the South, published in 1892, is one of the first Black feminist books. She became a popular lecturer, moved to Washington DC, and joined the Colored Women’s League, a coalition of black women’s clubs and service organizations. In 1900, she went the First Pan-African Conference in London, then to Paris for the World Exposition, and continued her travels in Germany and Italy. She was principal of M Street High School (1902-1906). In 1924, she was one of the first African American women to earn a Ph.D., a prestigious one from the Sorbonne in Paris. She became president of Frelinghuysen University (a college for working black adults who were part-time students) She retired again in 1954, and died in 1964 at the age of 105.
- August 10, 1894 – Dorothy Jacobs Bellanca born in Latvia, American labor leader; arrived in the U.S. at age 6, and became a garment worker at 13. She campaigned to convince male union leaders that unionizing women, a majority of the industry, benefited all workers. In 1914, Bellanca was one of only 5 women, out of 175 delegates, to attend the founding convention of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, where she promoted the need for women organizers. The ACWA clashed with the United Garment Workers, who didn’t promote women to leadership positions, and distrusted the ACWA’s more progressive socialist ideology. She was the first full-time woman organizer for the ACWA, then Joint Board Secretary (1918–?), then the ACWA’s first woman Vice President (1934-1946). In the 1930s, Bellanca helped found the American Labor Party, ran for Congress from Brooklyn, and organized labor and political support for federal housing, national health care, progressive labor laws, and civil rights legislation. She was on the New York City Mayor’s Commission in Unity, and the Maternal and Child Welfare Committee under U.S. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins. She died at age 52 in 1946.
- August 10, 1905 – Era Bell Thompson born, granddaughter of former slaves; American author and magazine editor. Her family moved to Driscoll, North Dakota, when she was 9 years old. They were the only black family in the small community. She wrote years later of her ignorance of blacks before she moved to Chicago after she graduated from college. In 1946, she published her first book, American Daughter. In 1947, she joined the staff of Ebony magazine as an associate editor. She became co-managing editor, and began foreign reporting in 1953. She worked in a variety of positions, and was instrumental in shaping the magazine’s vision. In 1954, she published Africa, Land of my Fathers, after exploring 18 African countries. She was still listed as an editor of Ebony in 1985, the year before she died.
- August 10, 1914 – Margaret Morgan Lawrence born, American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst; first black woman physician certified by the American Board of Pediatrics; Chief of the Developmental Psychiatry Service for Infants and Children at Harlem Hospital for 21 years, as well as associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, retiring in 1984. Did research on development of strength in black families; author of The Mental Health Team in Schools, and Young Inner City Families. A scholarship from the National Council of the Episcopal Church (1932-1936) enabled her to attend Cornell University. She was the only black undergraduate, and was denied a place in the segregated dormitory. At first, she supported herself by working as a maid for a white family, living in the attic, but later worked as a laboratory assistant. In spite of academic excellence, because of her race, she was refused admittance to Cornell Medical School, but was the third African American admitted to Columbia Medical School (1936-1940). Then she was rejected from a residency at New York Babies Hospital because of race, and rejected by Grasslands Hospital because she was a married woman. Lawrence completed a two-year pediatric residency at Harlem Hospital (1940-1942), then got her master’s in science at Columbia University’s School of Public Health. In 1948, she was the first Black person at the New York Psychiatric Institute, and the first African American psychoanalysis trainer at Columbia’s Psychoanalytic Center. She also earned certification as a pediatric psychiatrist (1951).
- August 10, 1923 – Dame Gillian Brown born, British diplomat; second woman to become a British ambassador. She joined the Foreign Office in 1944, and served in Budapest, Washington DC, and in Paris. She was the UK’s Ambassador to Norway (1981-1983), and then retired. Brown died at age 75 in April 1999.
- August 10, 1931 – Dolores Alexander born, lesbian, feminist, writer, and reporter; in 1960, she was not hired as a copy “girl” at the New York Times after working there as an intern because it would “cause a revolution in the newsroom.” She moved to the Newark Evening News, as a reporter, then copy editor to bureau chief (1961-1964), She then worked Newsday in various capacities (1964-1967). Alexander became chair of a committee of the National Task Force on Image of Women in Mass Media for the newly-formed National Organization for Women (NOW), and was NOW’s first Executive Director (1969- 1970), but resigned in protest over negative attitudes exhibited towards lesbians during NOW’s early inception. She and Jill Ward borrowed money from friends to renovate a run-down luncheonette in Greenwich Village NY, which opened in 1972 as Mother Courage, the first feminist restaurant in the U.S. Both women and men were served, but wine was poured for women to taste rather than their male guests, and checks were placed within equal distance of diners. It became a popular place for women dining solo, assured of good service and no male harassment. Alexander lectured on women’s rights, worked with the New Feminist Talent Collective, formed by Jacqueline Ceballos to provide speakers about the women’s movement; she also pushed for integration of want ads, beginning with the New York Times. Alexander died at age 76 in 2008.
- August 10, 1933 – Elizabeth Butler-Sloss born, British judge, Baroness Butler-Sloss; President of the Family Division of the High Court of Justice (1999-2005); first woman to serve as Lord Justice of Appeal (1988-1999); Family Division High Court Judge (1979-1988).
- August 10, 1962 – Suzanne Collins born, American television writer and science fiction/fantasy Young Adult novelist; began her TV career writing for Nickelodeon, and was head writer for Clifford’s Puppy Days; her first novel was Gregor the Overlander. Her first book in The Hunger Games series won the 2008 CYBIL Award for Fantasy and Science Fiction.
- August 10, 1963 – Phoolan Devi born to a poor family in rural India as Phoolan Mallah; notable as a Dacoit (bandit) who became a Member of Parliament. Sold off in marriage by her family to a much older man at the age of 11, she was abused physically and sexually. After multiple attempts, while still a teenager she finally managed to run away, becoming the only woman in a gang of bandits. She became lovers with one gang member, who took over after killing the gang’s leader, but this split the gang into two factions, and he was killed by the rival faction. The rivals took her to their village and held her prisoner, repeatedly gang raping her over several weeks. She escaped, found the remaining members of her faction, took another lover from among them, and a few months later, they descended upon the rival’s village and killed as many as 22 men, most of whom had raped her. The massacre was portrayed in some of the press as righteous, and she was dubbed Phoolan Devi (a respectful title), but also called the Bandit Queen. She evaded capture for two years before she and the few remaining gang members surrendered to police in 1983. She was charged with 48 crimes, including multiple murders, and spent 11 years in jail. In 1994, the state government summarily withdrew all charges against her, and she was released. She ran for parliament and was twice elected (1996-2001). In 2001, she was shot to death by relatives of the men she and her gang massacred.
- August 10, 1966 – Charlotte “Charlie” Dimmock born, English gardening expert and television presenter, known for Ground Force, a BBC garden makeover programme (1997-2005), and as a commentator for the Chelsea Flower Show.
- August 10, 1974 – Haifaa al-Mansour born, first and best-known Saudi Arabian woman filmmaker; after making three short films, she directed the documentary Women Without Shadows, which won the Golden Dagger for Best Documentary at the Muscat Film Festival in Oman. She wrote and directed Wadjda, the first full-length feature made entirely in Saudi Arabia and the first directed by a woman. It debuted at the 2012 Venice Film Festival, and was also the official Saudi Arabian entry for the Academy Awards Best Foreign Language Film. Her focus on women’s issues brought her criticism and hate mail, as well as praise. In 2015, she was selected as a jurist for the ‘Un Certain Regard’ section of the Cannes Film Festival. Mary Shelley, her drama about Shelley’s early life, premiered at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival. She directed and co-wrote The Perfect Candidate, which won the Brian Award at the Venice Film Festival in 2019.
- August 10, 1974 – Rachel Simmons born, American research scholar at New York’s Hewitt School; author of the 2002 book, Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, and the 2009 book, The Curse of the Good Girl.
- August 10, 1993 – Ruth Bader Ginsburg is sworn in as the second woman on the Supreme Court.
- August 10, 2019 – The Royal Bank of Scotland named Allison Rose as its new CEO, effective November 2019, following Ross McEwan. Allison Rose, a 25-year veteran at RBS, was McEwan’s deputy chief at NatWest Holdings. She is the first woman to head a major bank in the UK. RBS is currently partly state-owned, but the government is expected to sell off its final stake in the bank by 2024. RBS made Katie Murray its finance chief in January. None of RBS’s main rivals, including Barclay’s, Lloyd Banking Group, and HSBC (Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation), has ever appointed a woman to any of the top three boardroom positions in the male-dominated banking industry.
- August 10, 2021 – A news journalist, who could not identify herself because she is hiding from the Taliban in Afghanistan, got her story out to the Guardian newspaper. “Two days ago I had to flee my home and life in the north of Afghanistan after the Taliban took my city. I am still on the run and there is no safe place for me to go ... I can’t write under my own name or say where I am from or where I am ... In the past days my whole province has fallen to the Taliban. The only places that the government still controls are the airport and a few police district offices. I’m not safe because I’m a 22-year-old woman and I know that the Taliban are forcing families to give their daughters as wives for their fighters. I’m also not safe because I’m a news journalist and I know the Taliban will come looking for me and all of my colleagues” She fled with her uncle, but when they got to his village it was under Taliban control and they were told if the Taliban found out she was being hidden in the village, “they’d kill everyone.” She walked for hours to reach the home of a distant relative in a remote rural area with no electricity or running water. There is no route out of there that is not blocked by the Taliban. “Right now, everything is tense. All I can do is keep running and hope that a route out of the province opens up soon. Please pray for me.”
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- August 11, 1384 – Yolande of Aragon born, titular queen regnant of Aragon, was denied rule because she was a woman, and forced to marry Louis II of Anjou over her objections; she later supported the claim to the French throne of Charles the Dauphin, and helped finance Jeanne d’ Arc’s army, tipping the balance in favor of the French during the Lancastrian phase of the Hundred Years’ War between England and France.
- August 11, 1897 – Louise Bogan born, American poet, U.S. Consultant in Poetry (re-named Poet Laureate in 1986) to the Library of Congress (1945-1946), poetry editor of The New Yorker magazine (1931-1970).
- August 11, 1909 – Marie-Madeleine Fourcade born in Marseille, but grew up in Shanghai, where her father was with the French Maritime service. She attended convent schools, then married young, but became estranged from her husband, a career French officer. In 1936, she worked with a former French military intelligence officer, Major Georges Loustaunau-Lacau, on his magazine L’ordre national, and after the German invasion, he recruited her for his French Resistance network “Alliance.” In 1941, Loustaunau-Lacau was arrested and sentenced to two years in prison. He chose Fourcade to lead “Alliance.” One of her agents obtained a drawing of a German rocket and testing station which revealed the V2 rocket program to the Allies. When the Nazis took over Vichy France, she went on the run, eventually making her way to England in 1943. She worked with British intelligence at MI6 until 1944, when she returned to France. Fourcade was responsible for 3,000 resistance agents and survivors, and worked on publication of Mémorial de l'Alliance, dedicated to the resistance group's 429 dead. Despite her high profile position in the French resistance, as leader of the longest-running spy network, Charles de Gaulle didn’t include her among the 1,038 people he designated resistance heroes – only 6 were women. She wasn’t given the Order of the Liberation, though her estranged husband was. Fourcade chaired the Committee of Resistance Action (1962-1989). She died at age 80 in 1989. Her funeral at the Église Saint-Louis des Invalides, known as the “Soldiers’ Church,” was the first funeral for a woman held there.
- August 11, 1912 – Eva Ahnert-Rohlfs born, German astronomer; assistant astronomer at the Sonneberg Observatory (1945-1954); noted for her observations of variable stars.
- August 11, 1937 – Allegra Kent born as Iris Cohen, American ballet dancer, children’s book author, and columnist. After graduating from the School of American Ballet, she joined the New York City Ballet in 1953 at age 15, and was promoted to principal in 1957. George Balanchine created many roles in his ballets for her, including Seven Deadly Sins, Ivesiana, and Bugaku. She retired in 1981, and became a ballet teacher. In 1997, her autobiography, Once a Dancer, was published.
- August 11, 1941– Elizabeth Holtzman born, New York Democrat, youngest woman elected to U.S. Congress (1973-1981) to that time; also the first woman District Attorney in New York City (1981).
- August 11, 1941 – Alla Kushnir born in Russia, Israeli chess champion, Woman Grandmaster, three-time winner of the Women’s Chess Olympiads.
- August 11, 1942 – Actress Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil receive a patent for a frequency-hopping spread spectrum communication system that later became the basis for modern technologies in wireless telephones and Wi-Fi.
- August 11, 1955 – Sylvia Hermon born, Lady Hermon, lawyer and Northern Irish independent unionist politician, concerned with pensioner’s and women’s rights; Member of Parliament for North Down (2001-2019); longstanding supporter of the Alzheimer’s Research Trust, helping to launch its Northern Ireland network centre.
- August 11, 1965 – Viola Davis born, American actress, producer, and activist; first black actor to win the “Triple Crown” of American acting: the Academy Award (2008 and 2016), the Tony Award (2001 and 2010) and the Emmy Award (2015), the first black woman to win a Primetime Emmy Award for Lead Actress in a Drama Series (How to Get Away With Murder). Davis is the co-founder with her husband Julius Tennon of JuVee Productions. A feminist and activist for human rights and equal rights for women, and for women of color, she is also an active supporter of the Hunger Is campaign to eradicate childhood hunger in America.
- August 11, 1972 – Yvonne Wanrow, member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, shot and killed a man trying to molest her son. The trial, State of Washington v. Wanrow, was grossly mishandled, and the feminist and American Indian movements rallied to her defense. She was found guilty of second-degree murder and first-degree assault. In January, 1977, the Washington state Supreme Court ruled that Yvonne Wanrow was entitled to have a jury consider her actions in the light of her “perceptions of the situation, including those perceptions which were the product of our nation's long and unfortunate history of sex discrimination.” The ruling was the first in America recognizing the particular legal problems of women who defend themselves or their children from male attackers, and was again affirmed by the Washington Supreme Court in denying the prosecutor's petition for rehearing in 1979. Before the Wanrow decision, standard jury instructions asked what a "reasonably prudent man" would have done, even if the accused was a woman; the Wanrow decision set a precedent that when the defendant is a woman in a criminal trial the juries should ask "what a reasonably prudent woman similarly situated would have done." Wanrow became an active speaker for the women's movement, which had raised funds on her behalf. The American Indian Movement also helped Wanrow, highlighting unequal treatment of Native Americans by the criminal justice system.
- August 11, 1974 – Hadiqa Kiani born, Pakistani singer-songwriter, social activist, and the first Pakistani woman UN Goodwill Ambassador, in 2010. After the devastating 2010 floods in Pakistan, she volunteered with her siblings, working alongside the Pakistani Army distributing food, water, clothing, and shelter to flood victims, and visiting refugees; she helped finance and oversaw construction of over 250 houses for homeless families. She supported Yeh Hum Naheen, an anti-terrorism campaign, and also joined other Pakistani musicians in 2007 to produce an anti-terrorism song. In 2015, she was one of ten mentors in an initiative to support Pakistani women becoming community and national leaders, and overcoming gender discrimination. Kiani strongly opposes sexual abuse of children. She criticized actor Yasir Hussain for joking about child molestation, and expressed disappointment in the Pakistani entertainment industry for supporting him.
- August 11, 1974 – Audrey Mestre born, French marine biologist and record-setting free diver; her family moved to Mexico when she was in her teens; she studied marine biology at the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California Sur. In 2000, she broke the female world record for free diving, reaching 410 feet (125 meters) on a single breath, then broke her own record in 2001; she was killed in a diving accident in 2002.
- August 11, 1978 – Lillian Nakate born, Ugandan civil engineer and politician; Member of the Ugandan Parliament representing the Luweero District Women’s Constituency since 2016; worked as an engineer on construction projects and as a consultant (2011-2016); Town Engineer for Wobulenzi Town Council (2007-2011); Assistant Engineering Officer for Luweero District Local Government (2001-2006).
- August 11, 2019 – According to a report by the Guttmacher Institute, at least 79 bills relating to sex education were introduced in legislatures in 32 states and the District of Columbia. Most were aimed at expanding youth education around healthy sexuality and relationships — and reducing the abstinence-only ideology introduced into sex ed classes over the past four decades. In Colorado, a law passed in 2019 requires any sex education taught in the state’s public schools to be medically accurate and, in an unusual move, carved out $1 million to pay for it. In May 2019, California’s Board of Education updated its statewide framework for teaching comprehensive sex education to prioritize medical accuracy and sensitivity to diverse sexualities. In Virginia, a measure signed into law in March 2019 requires school-based sex education to include instruction on human trafficking. In Tennessee, where Republicans control the Senate, House, and governor’s office, lawmakers passed a bill encouraging schools to provide education on sexual violence awareness. Utah’s Republican governor signed a law allowing educators to discuss contraception in public school classrooms. Renewed interest in the issue was fueled in part by legislative wins for Democrats – and more female lawmakers — during November 2018’s midterm elections, but also by questions about sexual assault and consent raised by the #MeToo movement. Although women held fewer than 30% of state legislative seats, they introduced five out of every seven state bills updating sex education standards that were enacted in 2019, according to the left-leaning Center for American Progress think tank. Women also introduced over half the bills to modernize sex education in the 2020 sessions.
- August 11, 2020 – Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden named California senator Kamala Harris as his vice-presidential running mate. Harris, daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India, was the first Black woman and the first Asian American to be nominated by a major party for the vice presidency.
- August 11, 2021 – In the UK, a Green Party’s key plank is expansion of opportunities for young, intersectional, feminist political leadership. Tamsin Omond, who identifies as trans and non-binary, stood with Amelia Womack for election as co-leaders of the Green Party, in an attempt to increase the party’s national membership and prepare for a general election. Believed to be the first time a non-binary person contested the leadership of a national political party. Omond, a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion and a longtime activist against airport expansion and other climate issues, told the Guardian: “There is a stranded majority of people who are desperate to do something about the climate emergency, who are feeling anxious, who are doing everything they can … They need a national political party that has transformative policies, and the Green party is here for this moment.” Womack, deputy leader of the Greens, said, “People are desperate for a clear vision,” she said. “It’s not about individual action but genuine political change, structural change.” They lost to long-time Green Party members Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay.
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- August 12, 30 BC – Egyptian Queen Cleopatra VII Philopator, last ruler of the Ptolemaic Dynasty, commits suicide rather than be displayed in Rome as a prisoner of Octavian in his triumphal procession.
- August 12, 1806 – Elizabeth Oakes Smith born, prolific American author, poet, lecturer, and women’s rights activist. Though one of the speakers at the Seneca Falls Convention, she has been largely forgotten. ," A series of her essays "Woman and Her Needs” was published in the New York Tribune (1850-1851), arguing for women's intellectual capacities and equal rights to economic and political opportunities, including a right to higher education and the right to vote.
- August 12, 1833 – Lillie Devereux Blake born, American author (sometimes under the pen name Tiger Lily), suffragist, reformer, and Civil War correspondent for the New York Evening Post, New York World, and the Philadelphia Press. Known for her novels, Southwold and Rockford.
- August 12, 1859 – Katharine Lee Bates born, American writer, poet, academic, and social activist; her poem “America the Beautiful” became the lyrics for the song. A pioneer in creating American Literature as a field of study, she taught one of the subject’s first college courses, and wrote an early textbook. She co-founded Denison House, a settlement house in Boston, and worked for the rights of women, workers, people of color, immigrants, and slum dwellers; after WWI, she was active in the peace movement, and opposed American isolationism.
- August 12, 1867 – Edith Hamilton born in Germany, American author and educator, known for her books The Greek Way and Mythology.
- August 12, 1880 – Radclyffe Hall born, English poet and author; The Well of Loneliness was her groundbreaking 1928 novel of lesbian literature. Though not sexually explicit, it was the subject of an obscenity trial in the UK which resulted in a ruling that all copies of the book be destroyed. Its U.S. publication was allowed only after an extended court battle.
- August 12, 1907 – Gladys Bentley born, African American lesbian cross-dressing blues singer, pianist, and lyricist during the Harlem Renaissance. She appeared in her signature white tails and top hat, and sang in a deep, booming voice her own raunchy lyrics to popular tunes of the day. As a headliner at Harlem’s Ubangi Club, she was backed by a chorus of drag queens. With the repeal of Prohibition, the Harlem speakeasies began closing, and she moved to Southern California, but couldn’t recreate her success. She was often harassed for wearing men’s clothes. During the McCarthy era, she started wearing dresses, claimed to have been “cured” of lesbianism by taking female hormones, and was briefly married. She died of pneumonia in 1960 in Los Angeles, at age 52.
- August 12, 1914 – Ruth Lowe born, Canadian songwriter; her songs “I’ll Never Smile Again” and “Put Your Dreams Away” were early major hits for a young Frank Sinatra. “I’ll Never Smile Again,” recorded by Tommy Dorsey’s Orchestra with Frank Sinatra, was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1982.
- August 12, 1919 – Margaret Burbidge born in England, British-American astrophysicist; did undergraduate and graduate studies in astronomy at University College, London (1936-1939, Ph.D. 1943), but was turned down for a Carnegie Fellowship in 1945 for the Mount Wilson Observatory because only men were allowed there at the time. She did come to the U.S. in 1951 on a grant for the Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin, focusing on chemical abundances in stars. Returning to England in 1953, she collaborated with her husband and others on the stellar nuceleosynthesis theory, that all the chemical elements could be synthesized within stars by nuclear reaction. In 1955, she finally made it to Mount Wilson, posing as her husband’s assistant. When management found out, they agreed to let her stay on condition that the couple live in a cottage on the grounds instead of in the segregated dormitory. In 1972, for the first time in 300 years, the directorship of the Royal Greenwich Observatory was not combined with the post of the Astronomer Royal, but was given to Margaret Burbidge, while Martin Ryle got the more prestigious post of Astronomer Royal. Her appointment was short-lived. In 1974, she left after controversy broke out over moving the Isaac Newton Telescope from its place in the observatory to a more useful location. Burbidge became one of the foremost and most influential advocates for ending discrimination against women in the field of astronomy. In 1972, she turned down the Annie J. Cannon Award of the American Astronomical Society because it was awarded to women only. In 1984, the Society awarded her its highest honor, regardless of gender, the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship. Burbidge was the first director of the Center for Astrophysics and Space Science at the University of California San Diego (1979-1988). In 1976, she was the first woman president of the American Astronomy Society. In 1977, she became an American citizen. Elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 1981. In 1983, she was awarded the National Medal of Science. In 1988, she received the Albert Einstein World Award of Science.
- August 12, 1928 – Fatima Meer born, South African writer, academic, feminist, human rights and anti-Apartheid activist, a leader in the South African Indian community. In 1976, Meer was the first woman banned by the Apartheid regime, and put in solitary confinement. The ban was extended until 1981. She also survived two assassination attempts. She published over 40 books, including Higher than Hope (1988), the first biography of Nelson Mandela.
- August 12, 1945 – Dorothy E. Denning born, American computer scientist, software engineer and information security researcher, innovator in lattice-based access control (LBAC) and intrusion detection systems (IDS). Inducted into the National Cyber Security Hall of Fame in 2012; Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Defense Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School since 2016; author of Cryptography and Data Security; named a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery in 1995; recipient of the 2001 Augusta Ada Lovelace Award from the Association for Women in Computing.
- August 12, 1972 – Wendy Rue founded the National Association for Female Executives (NAFE), the largest U.S. businesswomen’s organization.
- August 12, 1990 – American paleontologist Sue Hendrickson discovered the largest and most complete Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton yet found, in South Dakota, dubbed “Sue” in her honor. It is displayed at the Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois.
- August 12, 2017 – Violence erupted at the white nationalist ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Heather Heyer, age 32, one of the anti-racist demonstrators staging a counter-protest, was killed by a white nationalist who deliberately rammed his car into the anti-racist crowd, killing Heyer and injuring 19 more. The 22-year-old driver was sentenced in 2019 to life imprisonment for 29 violations under federal hate crimes acts. At least 15 other counter-protesters were hurt by four other white supremacists, who were arrested for inciting a riot and attacking the counter-protesters.
- August 12, 2020 – The British Labour Party called on the government to take urgent action to ensure that women who have been pregnant during the pandemic do not have their maternity pay wrongly docked, warning that many could lose out on thousands of pounds. When the lockdown was imposed in March, pregnant women were added to the list of people seen as clinically vulnerable. Where workplaces were unable to be made Covid-secure, pregnant staff unable or unwilling to work should have been sent home on full pay. However, according to research by the Labour party, many were instead put on statutory sick pay (SSP). To qualify for statutory maternity pay (SMP) – the government support to new mothers paid over 39 weeks – pregnant women must have earned at least £120 a week on average during an eight-week lead-up period. But SSP is just £95.85 a week, meaning women at that level of pay for eight weeks or more would miss out on SMP. In April, the government changed the regulations to make sure pregnant women and expectant fathers did not lose out on maternity or paternity pay if they had been furloughed on 80% of their normal wage and had seen their pay fall below £120 a week. Labour is calling for the same change to be made for sick pay. Andy McDonald, Labour’s shadow employment rights minister, said: “It is wrong that pregnant women have not only lost income as a result of being wrongly sent home on sick pay rather than their full wage, but have had their maternity pay slashed as well … the government needs to act now, end this injustice and protect pregnant women’s rights.”
- August 12, 2021 – In the UK, Safe Spaces Now was launched, a music industry and UN Women UK initiative whose organizers say over 40% 0f women under age 40 have been sexually harassed at a live music event. The statistic doesn’t surprise Claire Barnett, Executive Director of UN Women UK. She said recently released data shows just 3% of 18-to-24-year-old women had not been harassed in a public space. “We had a lot of messages from people in that age group saying they were surprised it was as high as 3%. With young people it feels like a constant experience ... Live music is one of those spaces where people expect to be free. It is escapism, it’s your place of joy, and if that is somewhere we are hearing people are afraid then we need to take action. It is not OK for women to be constantly worried about their safety at festivals, to make sure they always have phone chargers on them so they can call someone if they feel unsafe.” Mabel, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Glastonbury Festival’s Emily Eavis, Anne-Marie, Clara Amfo, MNEK, and Rudimental are among the performers and industry leaders who are backing this call for change.
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- August 13, 1752 – Maria Carolina of Austria born, Queen consort of Naples and Sicily, wife of King Ferdinand IV & III and sister of Marie Antoinette; de facto ruler of her husband’s kingdoms, she oversaw many reforms, including revocation of a ban on Freemasonry, enlargement of the navy, and expulsion of Spanish influence; a believer in enlightened absolutism until her sister was executed during the French Revolution. She then made Naples a police state.
- August 13, 1818 – Lucy Stone born, abolitionist, women’s rights pioneer, and author; first Massachusetts woman to earn a college degree. She was hired by William Lloyd Garrison to write and deliver speeches for the American Anti-Slavery Society. Though she was often heckled, she became such a popular speaker that she out-earned many male lecturers. Stone was the co-organizer of the first National Women’s Convention in 1850, two years after Seneca Falls; a co-founder of the American Woman Suffrage Association, and co-founder with Henry Blackwell of the Woman’s Journal (1970-1931), a weekly newspaper “devoted to the interests of women – to their educational, industrial, legal and political Equality, and especially to their right of Suffrage.” She was courted by Blackwell, the brother of Doctors Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell, who persuaded her to marry him by promising they would create an egalitarian marriage. They omitted “obey” from her vows to love and honor him, and she kept her maiden name. Their daughter Alice Stone Blackwell became a feminist and abolitionist, working with her parents. Stone set another precedent in 1858 when she reminded Americans of the “no taxation without representation” principle. Her refusal to pay property taxes was punished by the impoundment and sale of the Stones’ household goods, but friends bought their property and returned to them. In 1879, Stone registered to vote in Massachusetts, since the state allowed women’s suffrage in some local elections, but she was removed from the rolls because she did not use her husband’s surname. Stone gave her last speech in 1893 at the World’s Columbian Exposition, the same year she died at age 75.
- August 13, 1829 – Martha J. Lamb born, American author, editor, historian, and reformer; owner-editor of The Magazine of American History; co-founder of the Home for the Friendless and the Half-Orphan Asylum; secretary of the United States Sanitary Commission.
- August 13, 1849 – Leonora Kearney Barry born in Ireland, American labor reformer and women’s rights activist, only woman to hold national office in the Knights of Labor.
- August 13, 1860 – Annie Oakley born as Phoebe Ann Moses Butler; American target and exhibition shooter, star of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show.
- August 13, 1890 – Ellen Osiier born, Danish 1924 Olympic champion; winner of the gold medal in the first women’s fencing event in the Olympics, the Women’s Individual Foil competition.
- August 13, 1904 – Margaret Tafoya born, matriarch of the Santa Clara Pueblo potters. Honored with a 1984 National Heritage Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts, the U.S. government’s highest honor in the folk and traditional arts. By the 1960s, she was well-known for the quality of her work, and especially for large blackware jars, some measuring as high as three feet. She used traditional techniques dating back at least 1200 years, but developed her own artistry and style, raising utilitarian objects to works of art.
- August 13, 1914 – Grace Bates born, American mathematician and academic, one of the few women who earned a Ph.D. in math in the 1940s. She had to fight to get into advanced classes in mathematics in high school and college, and had to petition to become the only woman studying differential equations at Middlebury College, which was segregated by sex. She got her master’s at Brown University in 1938. Bates taught in elementary and secondary schools for several years, then went to the University of Illinois to get her Ph.D. in 1949. She taught at Mount Holyoke College, becoming a full professor, then emeritus before her retirement in 1979; author of The Real Number System and Modern Algebra, Second Course.
- August 13, 1918 – Opha May Johnson becomes the first of the 305 women to enlist in the U.S. Marine Corps.
- August 13, 1933 – Joycelyn Elders born, American physician and research scientist, public health administrator as vice admiral in the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps; first African American and second woman appointed as U.S. Surgeon General (1993-1994).
- August 13, 1943 – Ertha Pascal-Trouillot born, acting President of Haiti (1990-1991), first Haitian woman to hold the office; also one of the first women in Haiti to earn a law degree. After several years as a federal judge (1975-1988), she became the first woman justice on Haiti’s Supreme Court.
- August 13, 1947 – Margareta Winberg born, Swedish Social Democratic politician; Swedish Ambassador to Brazil (2003-2007); Deputy Prime Minister of Sweden (2002-2003); Minister of Gender Equality (1998-2002); Minister for Labour (1996-1998); Minister for Agriculture (1994-1996). Outspoken feminist: in her interview for the 2005 Swedish documentary The Gender War, she expressed strong support for radical feminism, particularly feminist sociologist Eva Lundgren’s theory about the normalization of violence against women, including the role played by religion, which got Winberg into political hot water.
- August 13, 1948 – Kathleen Battle born, American operatic coloratura soprano; she started singing gospel music with the African Methodist Episcopal Church choir in her hometown of Portsmouth, Ohio. Her professional career began in 1972 when she auditioned for Thomas Schippers, who chose her to sing the soprano solo in Brahms’ German Requiem at the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, Italy. After orchestral concerts back in the U.S., she received a 1973 grant from the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund for Music to support her career. She made 1975 opera debut in The Barber of Seville with the Michigan Opera Theatre. By the 1980s, she was an established artist at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, but her temper and increasing demands caused a parting of the ways with the Met. In 1994. The opera company termed her behavior “unprofessional,” but she returned to the Met in 2016, with a recital of spirituals called “Kathleen Battle: Underground Railroad—A Spiritual Journey.”
- August 13, 1956 – Habib Bourguiba, Prime Minister of Tunisia (1956-1957) and then the nation’s first president (1957), decreed the Code of Personal Status, which gave women a unique place in the overwhelmingly Muslim region. The code abolished polygamy; created a judicial procedure for women to initiate divorce; and required mutual consent of both parties for marriage to take place. Women earned the right to vote, and then the right to seek office. In 1962, women were able to access birth control and by 1965, abortion was legalized. Tunisian women were required by law to be obedient to their husbands until an agreement presented by Tunisian feminist groups was ratified in 1985. Bourguiba's successor, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, announced two bills on the 50th anniversary of the Code of Personal Status that reinforced housing rights of mothers having custody of children, and established 18 as the minimum age for marriage for both sexes. Tunisia signed the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women in 1980, but with several reservations because of conflicts with the Quran. In 1994, National Women’s Day became a public holiday in Tunisia.
- August 13, 1963 – Valerie Plame (Wilson) born, American operations officer at the CIA (1985-2006) until her identity as a covert officer was leaked to the press by Richard Armitage of the State Department and Vice President Cheney’s Chief of Staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby. When the information was made public, she resigned, and worked with a ghostwriter on Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House.
- August 13, 1977 – Karine Jean-Pierre born, Haitian-American political analyst and advisor. Appointed White House Press Secretary in May, 2022, the first black woman and first openly LGBTQ+ person to hold the position. She worked on Kamala Harris’ campaign during the primaries in 2020, and was senior advisor and national spokeswoman for the progressive advocacy group MoveOn.org (2016-2019). She was a political analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, and a lecturer in international and public affairs at Columbia University. Her book Moving Forward: A Story of Hope, Hard Work, and the Promise of America, was published in 2019.
- August 13, 2014 – Maryam Mirzakhani won the Fields Medal for Outstanding Discoveries in Mathematics, the first woman and first Iranian to win the award. The Fields Medal, awarded once every four years, is viewed in the field as at least equivalent to a Nobel Prize.
- August 13, 2018 – A study of the pain drug reminfentanil to relieve labor pains during childbirth, showed it may be more effective than pethidine, the most widely used drug for labor pain since the 1950s, which is given by injection. Pethidine is not effective for up to 40% of women, who then need an epidural to block the pain, which often leads to a forceps or vacuum delivery, and can have damaging side effects to women as well. Remifentanil is delivered by a drip, controlled by the patient pressing a button when she feels pain. Women in the study who were using remifentanil were half as likely to end up asking for an epidural. Remifentanil has the added advantage of being cleared from the body very fast – within 10 minutes – so women are able to dose themselves just during contractions. One downside is that it can lead to low oxygen levels. That happened to 14% of women taking the drug, compared to 5% of those on pethidine, and all were given additional oxygen. Reminfentanil has been used during some surgical procedures, such as gastric bypass surgery, since the 1990s.
- August 13, 2019 – The Los Angeles Opera announced it would "engage outside counsel" to look into the allegations of sexual harassment by opera star Plácido Domingo. Nine women have come forward to accuse Domingo, the L.A. Opera's general director since 2003. In an Associated Press article, several women said he pressured them into sexual relationships, and that if they rebuffed his advances, he sometimes punished them professionally. Some of the accusations date back to the late 1980s. Domingo, 78, told AP the allegations are "deeply troubling and, as presented, inaccurate." He said he "believed that all of my interactions and relationships were always welcomed and consensual." By September, 2019, 11 more women had come forward with accusations. Several women who worked backstage said in interviews with Associated Press that his reputation for inappropriate conduct was so well known that they made a point of trying to keep him separate from young women performers and backstage workers. Melinda McLain, a production coordinator at both the LA Opera and Houston Grand Opera, said, “We created these elaborate schemes for keeping him away from particular singers.” She also said they invited Domingo’s wife Marta to company parties “because if Marta was around, he behaves.” Domingo spokesperson Nancy Selzer issued a statement that “we strongly dispute the misleading picture that the AP is attempting to paint of Mr. Domingo.” He stepped down as L.A. Opera’s general director in 2020 because of the allegations.
- August 13, 2020 – Violence in Sudan’s Western Darfur region forced 2,500 refugees to flee into Chad, over 70% of them women and children. Attacks, believed made by armed nomads in the town of Masteri in Western Darfur, killed 61 people in the Masalit ethnic community and injured at least 88. Houses were burned down in the town and the surrounding villages. A 25-year-old woman told UN staff “her husband was stabbed to death in front of her eyes and she had to run for her life with her three children, making the journey to Chad riding a donkey,” Babar Baloch, a spokesperson for the UN agency said. An estimated 20,000 Sudanese in Western Darfur were affected by the attacks, most of them women and children. Federal authorities in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, deployed additional forces to control and calm the situation, but the situation remained unstable. Many displaced people were reluctant to return home. Chad was hit by heavy rains which made travel more difficult, slowing getting refugees to camps further inland where food, water, and shelter are more available.
- August 13, 2021 – In the UK, a large crowd gathered at a vigil in Plymouth to mourn the five people killed the previous day by a 22-year-old gunman who killed his 51-year-old mother, a 43-year-old man, his three-year-old daughter, a 66-year old woman, and a 59-year-old man. He also wounded two others who survived. The shooter killed himself as police closed in. The shooter’s firearms licence was revoked in December 2020, but police reinstated it in July 2022 after he attended an anger management course. Police face an investigation over their dealings with the shooter, who expressed sympathy for the “incel” movement and a keen interest in mass shootings. Detectives are also facing questions over their decision to treat the attack – Britain’s worst mass shooting in over a decade – as a domestic incident rather than a terror attack.
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- August 14, 1814 – Charlotte Fowler Wells born, American phrenologist, teacher, and publisher. She taught classes in phrenology (the study of head bumps, which at the time were believed by some to indicate the individual’s mental traits – discredited by the 1900s as pseudo-science) until 1837, when she began helping to run the family business. O.S. & L.N. Fowler was a lecture bureau, museum, and publishing house. Her husband and brothers travelled frequently, so she was often left in charge of the business. In 1875, as a widow, she was sole proprietor and manager until 1884, when she formed a stock company, Fowler & Wells Company. She was the new company’s president, and published the American Phrenological Journal. In 1863. she co-founded and was a trustee of the New York Medical College for Women, one of the first medical schools founded exclusively to train women as doctors. Susan McKinney Steward graduated as valedictorian from the school in 1869, the first African American woman to earn a medical degree in New York state, and the third black woman doctor in the U.S.
- August 14, 1848 – Margaret Lindsay Huggins born, Anglo-Irish astronomer and scientific investigator; her grandfather, an amateur astronomer, shared his enthusiasm with her from an early age. Barred from formal training in astronomy, she studied by reading many books, and viewing the stars, with her grandfather, and on her own with a spectroscope she constructed. She was also interested in photography. When she was introduced to astronomer William Huggins, they began a lifetime collaboration, and were married in 1875. They were the first to observe and identify hydrogen lines in the spectrum of the star Vega, and observed the Nova Aurigae of 1892. She was in charge of visual observations, and photography, mainly at the Tulse Hill Observatory, while they both kept meticulous notes, and he did more of the writing for publications of their findings. Beginning in the 1880s, she was listed as co-author of their publications, a rare acknowledgement for a woman at the time. They worked together for 35 years as equal partners. After Williams’ death in 1910, Margaret faced increasing health problems of her own. She donated her scientific papers to Wellesley College in the U.S., as she was a supporter of women’s education, and greatly admired the advances American women were making in education and career opportunities.
- August 14 or 15 (?), 1882 – Gisela Richter born, prominent British-American classical archaeologist, art historian, and author; attended Girton College (1901-1904) at the University of Cambridge, but Cambridge did not award degrees to women at that time. After a year at the British School in Athens, she moved to the U.S. in 1905 and became an American citizen in 1917. Hired as an assistant at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1905, she was promoted to assistant curator in 1910, then associate curator in 1922. Richter was the Met’s first woman curator, of Greek and Roman art (1925- 1948), and one of that times most influential figures in classical art history. She wrote several popular books on classical art, increasing the general public’s understanding and appreciation of the subject, including Animals in Greek Sculpture: A Survey; Roman Portraits; A Handbook of Greek Art; and Greek, Etruscan and Roman Bronzes.
- August 14, 1895 – Amaza Lee Meredith born, African American architect, artist, and educator. Her father was a white master stair builder, and her mother was black, so they were banned from marrying in Virginia, and married in Washington DC. Her father’s business suffered, and he committed suicide in 1915, when she was 20 years old. She never received formal training in architecture because of both her race and gender, but after teaching elementary and high school classes for several years, she attended the Teacher’s College of Columbia University, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine arts by 1934. She became an art teacher at Virginia State College, where she founded the Fine Arts Department. In spite of her lack of training, she designed homes for many friends and family; her most notable design was for Azurest South, her own home which she shared with her companion, Dr. Edna Meade Colson. In 1935, she began her career at Virginia State University, and started work on Azuret South, which was completed in 1939. In 1947, she formed the Azuret Syndicate to create Azurest North, an African American leisure community of 120 lots in Sag Harbor, where several homes were her designs. She retired from teaching in 1958, but continued to design buildings through the 1960s.
- August 14, 1900 – Margret Boveri born, German journalist and writer who survived an uneasy relationship with the WWII Nazi regime to become one of the best-known post-war writers in Germany. She worked for the Foreign Affairs section of the Berliner Tageblatt newspaper (1934-1939), then was a foreign correspondent in Stockholm and New York City for the Frankfurter Zeitung newspaper. After the U.S. entered the war, she was interned in New York, but was returned to Europe, arriving in Lisbon in 1942, still working as a correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung, until it was banned in 1943. Boveri returned to Berlin, where her apartment was destroyed by an air strike. She then worked as a report writer in the German embassy in Madrid. Although she was never a member of the National Socialist Party, she worked as freelance writer for the National Socialist weekly Das Reich (1944-1945). After the war, she was an outspoken critic of the division of Germany by the Allies into separate political zones. In 1968, she was awarded the German Critics’ Prize, and in 1970, the Bundesverdienstkreuz, the highest civilian honour in West Germany, for promoting understanding between East and West Germany. Boveri died in West Berlin in 1975.
- August 14, 1908 – Jean Knox born, Jean Marcia Montagu, Baroness Swaythling; first wartime director (1941-1943) of the UK’s Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS). She began her career with the ATS, a women’s support service, performing kitchen duties, but was promoted in April 1941 to second subaltern and commanded a company. In July 1941, at age 32, she was given the rank of acting chief controller, and then was appointed as ATS director. Her rank was equivalent to a general in the British army. She travelled to Canada in 1942 to inspect the Canadian Women’s Army Corp and worked there for six weeks on a recruiting campaign. After her return to the UK, she was forced by health problems to relinquish her appointment, and retired from service in December 1942. By September 1941, the ATS had 65,000 enlistees, growing to 190,000 by VE Day. Women served in communications, as orderlies, drivers, postal workers, ammunition inspectors, radar operators, military police, and collected trajectory data on missiles, rockets, aircraft, and data on fire suppression systems. Some operated searchlight equipment, or worked on anti-aircraft gun crews. About 10% of the work done by the Royal Corps of Signals was taken over by women of the ATS, and some ATS companies were sent to active overseas theaters to handle communications. According to the Imperial War Museum, 717 ATS women died in service to their country. Princess Elizabeth, future Queen Elizabeth II, was an ATS lorry driver and mechanic.
- August 14, 1909 – Winifred C. Stanley born, American lawyer and Republican politician; U.S. House of Representatives member from New York (1943-1945). On June 19, 1944, she was the first to propose a bill for equal pay for equal work, HR 5056, but it expired in committee.
- August 14, 1911 – Ethel Payne born, American writer, journalist and columnist for The Chicago Defender; “The First Lady of the Black Press” with a reputation for asking tough questions; first African American woman radio and television commentator for a national news organization, CBS (1972-1982). A civil rights activist, and associate of the Women’s Institute for Freedom of the Press. In 1973, Payne was the first to serve as the Ida B. Wells Distinguished Journalism Chair at Fisk University.
- August 14, 1926 – Lina Wertmüller born, Italian writer and director; in 1977, the first woman ever nominated for an Academy Award for Directing, for Seven Beauties.
- August 14, 1932 – Lee Hoffman born as Shirley Bell Hoffman, American author and editor of early science fiction and folk music fanzines. Editor (1950-1953) of the highly regarded science fiction fanzine, Quandry, and began publication of the Science-Fiction Five Yearly in 1951, which continued until 2006. She was assistant editor (1956-1958) on the magazines Infinity Science Fiction and Science Fiction Adventures, and also edited and published the folk music fanzines, Caravan and Gardyloo. Between 1966 and 1977, she wrote 17 Western novels, and 4 science fiction novels. Her book, The Valdez Horses, won the 1967 Western Writers of America Spur Award for Best Novel. As ‘Georgia York’ she wrote historical romances (1979-1983). She died of a heart attack in 2007.
- August 14, 1940 – Judith Kazantzis born, English poet, social activist, anthologist, and feminist. Sister of novelist and playwright Rachel Billington, and of historian and writer Antonia Fraser. Kazantzis was a contributor to the feminist magazine Spare Rib, campaigned for prison reform and nuclear disarmament, and contributed to the poetry anthology Emergency Verse - Poetry in Defence of the Welfare State. Her 12 volumes of poetry include Just After Midnight, Flame Tree, Freight Song, and Let’s Pretend. Kazantzis edited several anthologies, including Poems on The Underground (a collection of poems originally displayed on the London Underground).
- August 14, 1956 – Erica Flapan born, American mathematician, researched low-dimensional topology and knot theory; professor of mathematics at Pomona College in California; won a 2011 Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics, from the Mathematical Association of America; fellow of the American Mathematical Society since 2012.
- August 14, 1966 – Halle Berry born, African American actress, producer, environmental activist. and political activist. Won an Oscar for Best Actress for her performance in Monster’s Ball, and both a Golden Globe and a Prime-Time Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series for Introducing Dorothy Dandridge. Her Executive Producer credits include the 2017 film Kidnap, and the TV series Boomerang (2019-2020). She was part of the group which successfully fought against a proposed liquefied natural gas facility to be sited in the Pacific Ocean near Malibu, campaigned to raise funds for women’s health and education issues, and testified with Jennifer Garner before the California State Assembly’s Judiciary Committee in support of a 2013 bill to protect celebrities’ children from harassment by photographers.
- August 14, 1969 – Tracy Caldwell Dyson born, American chemist and NASA astronaut; Mission Specialist on the Space Shuttle Endeavour in 2007, and Expedition 24 crew member on the International Space Station in 2010; she completed three space walks, and logged over 22 hours.
- August 14, 2004 – Marsai Martin born, African-American actress and producer; played Diane Johnson on the TV sitcom Black-ish (2014-2022), and won the 2016 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy. In 2019, Martin starred in the comedy film Little, which she executive produced. At age 15, she was the youngest producer of a studio film.
- August 14, 2019 – Evelyn Beatríz Hernández Cruz, now age 21, went on trial for the second time, victim of the aggressive criminal persecution in El Salvador of women who suffer obstetric complications. Cruz, who was raped, was 18 years old when she entered the outside latrine at her family home suffering diarrhea and severe abdominal pain. She gave birth to a stillborn boy, and lost consciousness due to heavy bleeding. Her mother, a domestic worker, found Hernández passed out and covered in blood and took her to the nearest public hospital, unaware of the cause of her daughter’s condition. The emergency medical staff called police and prosecutors. Three days later, Hernández was transferred to the women’s prison to await trial for deliberately killing her unborn baby. She insisted that she didn’t know she was pregnant, and occasionally menstruated after being raped. The medical coroner recorded aspiration pneumonia as the cause of death, having discovered meconium, fecal matter, in the baby’s lungs and stomach. Despite the autopsy results, in July 2017 Hernández was sentenced to 30 years in prison for aggravated homicide. She was freed in February after serving 33 months in an overcrowded jail, when an appeal judge quashed the conviction on the grounds that the evidence presented at trial did not prove Hernández intended – directly or indirectly – to harm the fetus. Prosecutors then retried Hernández on the same charge. “Why? Because in El Salvador all women are considered second-class citizens, and poor vulnerable women like Evelyn, third-class citizens, so the full weight of the justice system is thrown at them regardless of the evidence,” said Paula Avila-Guillen, director of Latin America initiatives at the New York-based Women’s Equality Centre. Hernández Cruz was acquitted in the retrial. Abortion became illegal in El Salvador under all circumstances in 1998, when legislators voted to strip women of their reproductive rights without any public debate or medical consultation about the consequences. Dozens of women have been prosecuted for homicide and manslaughter after suffering miscarriages or stillbirths. There is growing public support for allowing abortion in circumstances such as rape, incest, or if the woman’s life is at risk, but in 2018 a legislative bill to ease restrictions failed at the last hurdle.
- August 14, 2020 – A second day of protests in Belarus, as growing numbers of women, many wearing white and holding flowers, paraded in central Minsk, because of gruesome violence inflicted on thousands of Belarusians. After Alexander Lukashenko, the authoritarian president of Belarus since 1994, claimed to have won the August 9 election by an implausible 80%, Belarusian workers took to the streets in protest, only to be met by some of the worst police violence in modern European history. Even some people who were not protesting, including a man on his way home from work, and an accredited journalist waving his ID, were arrested and badly beaten by police gangs. “We are here to show solidarity with all our men who were beaten up and abused,” said Tatyana, a 31-year-old waitress at the very front of a column of about 1,000 women holding a white flag with her friend, which she said was a sign of their desire for no more violence. By the following evening, thousands of protesters descended on the Belarusian parliament. As demand for change intensifies and reaches even the factories that are the pride of Alexander Lukashenko’s neo-Soviet economy, the authoritarian ruler ended the week clinging on to power in defiance of an ever-broader coalition of opponents. From the beginning, this has been an uprising inspired and led by women. After several male presidential candidates were arrested or fled in the run-up to the vote, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the wife of one of them, stepped in. Together with two other women, the trio offered a simple program that inspired many Belarusians: swift new elections that would be free and fair. Lukashenko, misreading the mood of the country he has led for 26 years, laughed at Tikhanovskaya, suggesting she should focus on cooking dinner for her children. The attacks only made people admire the resolve of Tikhanovskaya more. “The three of us were able to show that we had taken responsibly for what is happening and for the future of Belarus,” said Maria Kolesnikova, the only one of the all-female trio who remains in Belarus, in an interview in central Minsk. “The West won’t help, Russia won’t help, we can only help ourselves. Our female faces became a signal for all women – and for the men too – that every person should take responsibility.” In September, 2021, she was sentenced to 11 years in a penal colony for her political activity.
- August 14, 2021 – As Taliban insurgents continued to seize territory from government forces across Afghanistan, armed fighters walked into the offices of Azizi Bank in Kandahar, and told nine women employees they must leave. According to the bank’s manager and three of the women, the gunmen escorted them to their homes, and told their male relatives that they could take the women’s places. Noor Khatera, a 43-year-old woman who worked in the accounts department of the bank said, "It's really strange to not be allowed to get to work, but now this is what it is. I taught myself English and even learned how to operate a computer, but now I will have to look for a place where I can just work with more women around." Two days after the incident in Kandahar, women working at Bank Milli in Herat were berated by armed Taliban fighters for showing their faces in public, and told to leave. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid did not respond to a request for comment about the two incidents, and when asked whether women would be allowed to work in banks in areas controlled by the Taliban, Mujahid said no decision had yet been made, but since January, 2022, Afghan women have been increasingly cut off from education, employment, and freedom of movement.
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- August 15, 1787 – Eliza Lee Cabot Follen born, American writer, editor, poet, hymnist, and abolitionist; she became a Unitarian. Among her many works are two edited for the Sunday school classroom: Christian Teacher's Manual and a periodical called The Child’s Friend. She also wrote Anti-Slavery Hymns and Songs, and To Mothers in the Free States, and a collection of poems for children called The Lark and the Linnet.
- August 15, 1818 – Bridget “Biddy” Mason born in Georgia as a slave, separated from her parents, given as a wedding gift to Robert Smith and his bride; she bore three children whose likely father was Robert Smith. When Smith converted to Mormonism, he moved his entire household West, ending in the free state of California, where in 1856 Biddy Mason filed a petition for her freedom in Los Angeles County Court, but was not allowed testify in her own behalf. When Smith failed to appear, she, her three daughters, and 13 other slaves were granted their freedom, a landmark decision in California law. While she had no formal education, she had been trained by other slave women as a midwife, and found work in Los Angeles delivering babies. She saved enough to buy a house and land, one of the first black women to own property in Los Angeles, then successfully bought and sold property during the land boom, amassing a substantial profit, which she used to start a daycare center, a shelter, and a soup kitchen for the poor, and gave much of the money to build the Los Angeles First AME Church.
- August 15, 1841 – Julia Tutwiler born, American educator and social reformer; advocate for women's rights, especially to higher education, and for prison reform. She was the only woman president of Livingston Normal College (1890-1907), now University of West Alabama, and a key figure in creation of the Alabama Girls' Industrial School in 1896. Tutwiler was inducted into the Alabama Women’s Hall of Fame.
- August 15, 1858 – Edith Nesbit born, British author, poet, and political activist, published children’s books under the name E. Nesbit. A co-founder of the Fabian Society in 1884; other early members included George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Annie Besant, and Emmeline Pankhurst.
- August 15, 1860 – Henrietta Vinton Davis born, American orator and playwright; first international organizer for the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL); a signer of Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World; served as an officer in the UNIA-ACL, and later for rival UNIA, Inc.
- August 15, 1860 – Florence Kling Harding born, American newspaper business manager and U.S. First Lady (1921-1923). She married Warren G. Harding, five years her junior, in 1891. He was the publisher of The Marion Star, the only daily newspaper in Marion, Ohio, and she became deeply involved in the newspaper, running the paper’s circulation department, and then the business office when the manager quit. Many considered her the real brains behind the operation. She kept the paper running during her husband’s recurring illnesses, which were later recognized as early signs of the heart condition which would kill him. When he entered politics, she helped keep his adulterous affairs under wraps, carefully managing his public image. She was the first First Lady to vote, the first to ride in an airplane, to own a radio, to operate a movie camera, and the first to invite movie stars to the White House. She also had a strong influence over the selection of cabinet members. She praised Madame Curie when Curie visited the White House, as an example of a professional woman who was also a supportive wife. Her special project as First Lady was the welfare of war veterans. Warren G. Harding died of a heart attack in San Francisco in August, 1923, after falling ill during a coast-to-coast rail tour. Florence Harding died of renal failure in November, 1924, at age 64.
- August 15, 1879 – Ethel Barrymore born as Ethel May Blythe, American stage, screen, radio and television actress, member of the Barrymore acting dynasty. Along with her friend, actress Marie Dressler, she was a strong supporter of the Actors’ Equity Association, and had a high-profile role in the 1919 strike, when the AEA was fighting for performers to have a bigger share in the profits of stage productions, and to provide benefits for elderly and disabled actors. Her participation ended her friendship with George M. Cohan, who was both a performer and a producer, after he took the producers’ side during the strike. Her career began while she was still in her teens, after her mother’s death from tuberculosis at age 36 in 1893. Barrymore and her brother Lionel both had to earn a living, and neither finished high school. She found success onstage both in the U.S. and Great Britain, where Winston Churchill was among her many admirers. By 1928, she was so popular on Broadway that when the Shuberts opened a new theatre on 47th Street, they named it the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, and she appeared in its first production, The Kingdom of God. It is now the only theatre named by the Shuberts for one of their stars that has remained as a legitimate theatre in New York. She won the 1944 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for the film None but the Lonely Heart, and was nominated as supporting actress for three additional films. She died in 1959 of heart disease, shortly before her 80th birthday.
- August 15, 1885 – Edna Ferber born, American novelist and playwright; 1925 Pulitzer Prize for So Big; novels Giant, Showboat, Saratoga Trunk: also co-author with George S. Kaufman of the plays Dinner at Eight and Stage Door.
- August 15, 1886 – Gerty Radnitz Cori born, Jewish Czech-American biochemist; one of the few women in medical school in Prague in 1917, where she met Carl F. Cori; they were married upon graduation in 1920, and emigrated to America in 1922. They collaborated on medical research, and published their findings as co-authors at Carl’s insistence, in spite of attempts by the institutions who hired him to discourage the practice; Gerty Cori became the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1947), shared with her husband and Argentine physiologist Bernardo Houssay (who did related work on the role of the pituitary gland), for their discovery of the mechanism by which glucogen is broken down in muscle tissue into lactic acid, then resynthesized in the body and stored as a source of energy (known as the Cori cycle). They also identified the important catalyzing compound, the Cori ester. She died in 1957, after a ten-year struggle with myelosclerosis, a rare form of bone cancer, but still active in research until the end. In 2004, both Carl and Gerty Cori were honored posthumously by the American Chemical Society for their achievements in expanding knowledge of carbohydrate metabolism.
- August 15, 1896 – Catherine Doherty born in Russia, Baroness Ekaterina Fyodorovna Kolyschkine de Hueck Doherty; Russian Canadian Catholic social worker, social justice activist, author, and notable public speaker. Ekaterina, born into a family of minor Russian nobility, was raised in the Russian Orthodox Church. In 1912, she was married at age 15 to her first cousin Baron Boris de Hueck. During WWI, she became a Red Cross nurse at the front. She and her husband barely escaped during the Russian Revolution, and endured near-starvation as refugees in Finland before they reached England in 1919. She converted to Catholicism. Next, they emigrated to Canada. She began earning money as a speaker, becoming a regular on the U.S. Chautauqua lecture circuit, but the strain of long absences shattered her marriage. In 1932, she gave up all her possessions to establish Friendship House in downtown Toronto, running a soup kitchen, teaching, and living among the poor. Labeled a communist sympathizer, she had to close Friendship House in 1936. She spent a year in Europe observing Catholic lay action groups, and then established a new Friendship House in Harlem in New York. The interracial center distributed goods to the poor, hosting lectures and discussions to promote racial understanding. In 1943, after her first marriage was annulled because they were first cousins, she married Eddie Doherty, an American journalist. The Dohertys left New York in 1947, moving to Combermere, Ontario, Canada, to retire, but she was soon running a new rural apostolate, Madonna House, which now has field-houses throughout the world. She died in 1985, at the age of 89.
- August 15, 1912 – Julia Child born, American author of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and pioneer in television cooking; columnist for the Boston Globe; host of The French Chef (1963-1973), one of the first cooking shows on American television.
- August 15, 1913 – Aurora Castillo born, community activist and environmentalist, co-founded Mothers of East Los Angeles in 1984, which successfully opposed a plan to build a toxic waste incinerator and a state prison in East Los Angeles. Castillo was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize in 1995.
- August 15, 1924 – Hedy Epstein born in Germany, Jewish-American political activist; rescued from Nazi Germany by the Kindertransport in 1939. In England she worked in a munitions factory. All but two of her family were killed at Auschwitz. After the war, she worked with Allied occupying forces in Germany, then immigrated to the U.S. in 1948. She became an activist for affordable housing, the antiwar movement, and reproductive choice. In 1982, after reading news reports of massacres committed by a Lebanese Phalangist militia with the complicity of the IDF during Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Epstein became an opponent of Israel's military policies. In 2001, she founded the St. Louis chapter of the anti-war group, Women in Black. In 2003, she began traveling to the West Bank to work with the International Solidarity Movement, reporting in 2004 that at the age of 80, she was strip searched and cavity searched by guards at Ben Gurion International Airport. When she tried to speak on U.S. college campuses about what she had observed and experienced, she was vilified by several Jewish organizations for “demonizing both Israelis and Jews” and inflaming anti-Semitism. Ill-heath curtailed her participation in attempts to break Israel’s naval blockade of ships attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to the Palestinians, but she was arrested in 2014 for failure to disperse at a Black Lives Matter protest in St. Louis against the killing of Michael Brown and subsequent police actions. She died at age 91 from cancer in 2016.
- August 15, 1925 – Gertrude Shope born in South Africa but raised in Zimbabwe; South African politician and activist; was a member of the Government of National Unity Parliament in 1994. She taught in Natal and Soweto, but joined the African National Congress in 1954, and resigned her position as part of the boycott of the Bantu Education Act, which reinforced apartheid by insuring an inferior education for black children. Active in the Federation of South African Women, but Shope joined her husband in exile (1966-1990), and they travelled to lobby for support of the ANC. She also worked for the World Federation of Trade Unions during their exile. Shope was elected in 1991 as president of the ANC’s Women’s League, serving until 1993, and also worked with Albertina Sisulu on convening the ANC’s Internal Leadership Corps Task Force (1990-1991)
- August 15, 1935 – Régine Deforges born, French author, editor, and playwright; first woman to own and operate a publishing house in France. She was frequently censored, prosecuted, and heavily fined for publishing “offensive” literature. Her best-known novel, La Bicyclette bleue (The Blue Bicycle), became a bestseller in France in 1981, and was followed by six sequels. There was a major international intellectual property case when Deforges was accused of plagiarizing Gone With the Wind. Initially found guilty, she won her case on appeal, and the order to pay damages was rescinded.
- August 15, 1938 – Maxine Waters born, American Democratic politician; U.S. Representative from California since 1991, member of the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Progressive Caucus; California State assemblywoman (1976-1990); outspoken opponent of the administrations of both Bushes and Donald Trump.
- August 15, 1951 – Ann Biderman born, American screenwriter and television producer; adapted screenplay for the English language version of Smilla's Sense of Snow; creator and producer of the TV series Southland and Ray Donovan.
- August 15, 1961 – Suhasini Mani Ratnam born, Indian actress known as Suhasini; director, producer, and writer. Director of the film Indira in 1995, and Penn in 1991 for television. She was one of the writers on Ravanan (epic adventure film), and Iruvar (political film).
- August 15, 1974 – Natasha Henstridge born, Canadian actress known for the science fiction film, Species, and its two sequels, and her role as Colleen on the Canadian television drama Diggstown. In 2017, she joined six other actresses in accusing director Brett Ratner of sexual assault and harassment. Warner Brothers severed its ties with Ratner.
- August 15, 1983 – Anita Sarkeesian born, Canadian-American blogger and feminist media critic. She launched her website Feminist Frequency in 2009, and became known for her video series Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, which made her a target for online harassment and threats.
- August 15, 2012 – “Young and Strong” is a model program developed at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston to address the significant challenges facing young women with breast cancer. The new model was designed to serve young women with breast cancer who are receiving care outside of the comprehensive cancer setting, particularly in places where resources are limited. Ann H. Partridge, MD, MPH, director of the Program for Young Women with Breast Cancer, heads the multidisciplinary advisory group composed of patient advocates; providers from medical oncology, breast surgery, radiation oncology, nursing, and social work; and translational, psychosocial, and population-based investigators.
- August 15, 2019 – Israel announced it will block the US representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib from entering the country after public pressure from Donald Trump. The official reason given was their advocacy of a boycott and sanctions against Israel because of its treatment of Palestinians. The women are among the four new Democratic representatives in Congress that Trump said in July 2019 should go back to the countries they “originally came from.” Three of the four women were born in the U.S. but Ilhan Omar, daughter of Somali refugees, moved to America in 1995 with her family after four years in a Kenyan refugee camp. She became a U.S. citizen in 2000. Rashida Tlaib is of Palestinian descent, and wanted to see her 90-year-old grandmother who lives in the occupied West Bank.
- August 15, 2020 – A century after U.S. women won the right to vote when the 19th Amendment was ratified on August 18, 1920, a Pew Research Center survey shows that overall, 49% of Americans say women getting the right to vote has been the most important milestone in advancing American women’s position. Of those in the survey, 12% of men and 8% of women thought the U.S. has gone too far on gender equality; 49% of men and 64% of women say the U.S. hasn’t gone far enough on equal rights for women; and 37% of men and 27% of women thought women’s rights in the U.S. were about where they should be. Of Republicans and those who lean Republican, 17% said Gone Too Far, 33% Not Far Enough, and 48% About Right. Of Democrats/Lean Democratic, 4% said Gone Too Far, 76% Not Far Enough, and 19% About Right. Americans are more dissatisfied with the state of gender equality now than when the question was asked in 2017. Then, half of adults said the country hadn’t gone far enough in giving women equal rights with men, compared with 57% of adults today. This attitudinal shift has occurred across both gender and party lines.
- August 15, 2020 – In a report on the PBS News Hour, journalist Amanda Zamora cited statistics on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on U.S. women wage earners: “... women are experiencing double-digit unemployment for the first time. We had made such tremendous gains in the workforce over the last half of the century and women have seen those virtually evaporate overnight. Women have lost 11 million jobs in the first months of this pandemic. And experts say that 8% of those jobs, that's tens of thousands of women at work, are not coming back ...”
- August 15, 2021 – The Taliban took control of Kabul, and immediately imposed severe restriction on women and girls. Apart from healthcare workers, women were told they cannot return to work or travel in public without being accompanied by a Mahram (male guardian). By mid-September, girls above the age of 12 weren’t allowed to go to school, and rigid gender segregation at universities severely curtailed women in higher education. Preventing women from working has exacerbated economic problems for many families, and removing women from government jobs is leaving a huge hole in the state’s capacity to govern effectively. Fawzia Amini, a former senior judge in Afghanistan’s Supreme Court, said, “The Taliban have institutionalized discrimination against women: they are denying our fundamental rights … they want to wipe women from the face of society and make us all prisoners in our own homes.”
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- August 16, 1565 – Christina de Lorraine born, Grand Duchess consort of Tuscany; dowager Grand Duchess after her husband’s death in 1609, wielded great influence in her son’s court. After his death, she served as co-regent of Tuscany (1621-1628) with her daughter in-law during the minority of her grandson. Christina was greatly involved in dealing with the Florentine religious establishment. Galileo wrote a long letter to her concerning his belief that the Earth revolved around the Sun instead of the other way around. He wrote to her because Benedetto Castelli, a former student of his, who’d been a guest at a dinner with Grand Duke Cosimo II de’ Medici, told him she was the only person who kept asking questions after philosopher Cosimo Boscaglia argued that the motion of the Earth could not be true because it was contrary to the Bible, and Castelli was called upon to respond. Galileo’s letter was really a treatise that he hoped would be shared with others, but it didn’t help his cause, because Christina’s primary interest was in advancing the cause of the Medici.
- August 16, 1813 – Sarah Porter born, American educator, founder of Miss Porter’s School, a private girl’s college preparatory school; she acquired her education through private tutoring by Yale professors, and continued study on her own. Her school was a pioneer in offering an expanded curriculum for women, including the sciences.
- August 16, 1836 – Virginia Thrall Smith born, American social and charity worker, City Missionary Society member, established Connecticut’s first free kindergarten; elected to the Connecticut State Board of Charities, started the Connecticut Children’s Aid Society, founder of a children’s home that became the Newington Children’s Hospital.
- August 16, 1864 – Dr. Elsie Inglis born in India where her father was a magistrate, a commissioner of the East India Company, and an advocate for educating women. After her father’s retirement, the family returned to Edinburgh, where Elsie was educated, then went to finishing school in Paris. She nursed her mother who contracted scarlet fever, until she died in 1885. In 1887, Dr. Sophia Jex-Blake opened the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women, and Inglis started her studies there, but disagreements with Jex-Blake escalated until two of classmates of Inglis were expelled. Inglis and her father then founded the Edinburgh College of Medicine for Women, under the auspices of the Scottish Association for the Medical Education of Women, whose sponsors included Sir William Muir, a friend of her father from India, now Principal of the University of Edinburgh. Inglis's sponsors also arranged clinical training for women students under Sir William MacEwen at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. Inglis became an innovative doctor, a pioneering surgeon, a suffragist, and the founder of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals. In 1892, Inglis earned the Triple Qualification, becoming a Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, and the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow. Appalled by the standard of care and lack of specialisation in the needs of female patients, she took a post at Elizabeth Garrett Anderson's pioneering New Hospital for Women in London, and then at the Rotunda in Dublin, a leading maternity hospital. Inglis gained her MBChM qualification in 1899, from the University of Edinburgh, after it opened its medical courses to women. While taking this course, she was also nursing her father until his death in 1894. Inglis said, “Whatever I am, whatever I have done - I owe it all to my father.” She was a lecturer in gynaecology at the Medical College for Women, then set up a medical practice with former classmate Jessie MacLaren MacGregor. They opened a maternity hospital, named The Hospice, for poor women alongside a midwifery resource and training centre, initially with an operating theater and eight beds, then moved into larger quarters. The Hospice was later renamed the Elsie Inglis Memorial Maternity Hospital. She expanded her knowledge while visiting an innovative maternity hospital in the U.S. in 1913. Inglis often waived her fees, and even paid costs for some patients to recover at the sea-side. She joined the suffrage movement in the 1880s, and served as secretary (1906-1914) of the Edinburgh National Society for Women’s Suffrage, then worked with English suffrage leader Millicent Fawcett, and spoke at events all over Great Britain. She spearheaded the Scottish Women's Hospitals for Foreign Service initiative, and raised money for the Scottish Women's Hospitals (SWH). Sir George Beatson of the Scottish Red Cross turned down her request for assistance and funding, declaring he would have “nothing to say to a hospital staffed by women.” Beginning with her own contribution of £100, by the end of her first month of fundraising, Inglis had raised £1,000 toward her goal of £50,000. The efforts of her Scottish Women's Hospitals for Foreign Service during WWI to treat the wounded at the front, was opposed by the government. When she offered the Royal Army Medical Corps a ready-made medical unit of qualified women, she was told to “go home and sit still.” But the French government immediately took up her offer, and established a unit in France, while she led her own unit in Serbia. The French unit began with 100 beds, but expanded to 600 beds to cope with the huge number of casualties from the battles, including the Somme. Inglis worked to improve sanitary conditions in Serbia, greatly reducing the number of deaths from typhus and other diseases, which also took the lives of four of the SWS’s staff there. In all, the SWS sent 14 units to Belgium, France, Serbia, and Russia. Inglis was the first woman honored with the Serbian Order of the White Eagle, in recognition of her work during WWI. She died of cancer in November 1917, at age 53. Her body lay in state at St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh. British and Serbian royalty attended her funeral, and the buglers of the Royal Scots played the Last Post. People lined the streets as her coffin was carried to burial at the Dean Cemetery near her parents. Winston Churchill said of Inglis and her nurses "they will shine in history." The Elsie Inglis Memorial Maternity Hospital was operational until 1988.
- August 16, 1865 – Mary Gilmore born, Australian writer, journalist, poet, labor movement activist, and crusader for the disadvantaged; inaugural editor of the women’s section of The Australian Worker (1908-1931), advocating for women’s suffrage, pensions for the elderly and invalids, and just treatment of the Aboriginal people. During this time she also wrote for The Bulletin and The Sydney Morning Herald. Her first volume of poetry was published in 1910, followed by 20 additional collections; her best known poem is “No Foe Shall Gather Our Harvest,” a morale booster during WWII. Appointed Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1937 for her contributions to literature. By the late 1940s, she was the doyenne of the Sydney literati, and in the 1950s and 60s became a well-known personality on radio and television. At 87, she began writing “Arrows,” a column for The Tribune, the Australian Communist Party’s newspaper (1952-1963), but never joined the party. When Dame Mary died at age 97, she was accorded a state funeral, one of the few writers to be so honored. Her likeness has been featured on the Australian ten-dollar note since 1993.
- August 16, 1900 – Ida A. Browne born, Australian geologist and palaeontologist; graduated from the University of Sydney with Honors in 1922, and won the University medal in geology. She worked as a demonstrator in geology and petrology at the University (1922-1927), researching the minerals and geology of New South Wales. A Linnean-Macleay Fellowship (1927-1931) enabled her to extensively map the region, and also paid for travels overseas to research facilities and conferences. In 1932, she was the second woman at the University of Sydney to earn a doctorate in Geology, but was unable to find work in her field. No mining company would hire her because women were forbidden to work underground. She returned to the University, and was promoted from demonstrator to Assistant Lecturer in palaeontology when Professor W.S. Dun became ill, putting aside her geology studies to gain extensive knowledge of palaeontology, and keep ahead of her students. She became a full Lecturer in 1940. Moving from hard rock to soft rock studies, Brown's research evolved into the study of Palaeozoic invertebrates, specifically brachiopods, and stratigraphical studies. She had exceptional mapping skills; her Taemas map continues to be used. Promoted to Senior Lecturer in 1945, but she resigned from teaching in 1950 when she married fellow geologist and colleague, William Rowan Browne. She worked with him, often in the field, and continued publishing papers under her name. Browne was a member and first woman president of both the Royal Society of New South Wales (president 1942-1950) and of the Linnean Society of New South Wales (president in 1953); member of the Australian National Research Council, and the Geological Society of Australia.
- August 16, 1902 – Georgette Heyer born, British novelist, author of contemporary mystery novels, but better known for her historical romances, often set in the Regency period. Admired for her wit, extensive research, and meticulous depiction of the period, her description of Battle of Waterloo in An Infamous Army was so definitive, military history instructors at Royal Military Academy Sandhurst have used it in their classes.
- August 16, 1928 – Eydie Gormé born, American pop show tune singer-songwriter, Grammy and Emmy Award-winner; inducted with husband Steve Lawrence into the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame in 1995.
- August 16, 1947 – Carol Moseley Braun born, American politician and diplomat; U.S. Ambassador to Samoa (2000-2001); U.S. Ambassador to New Zealand (1999-2001); the first African American woman U.S Senator, and first woman U.S. Senator from Illinois (1993-1999); considered centrist or conservative on economic issues, but liberal on social issues; strongly pro-choice, against the death penalty, and in favor of gun control; voted against the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). In 1993, she convinced the Senate Judiciary Committee to reject the United Daughters of the Confederacy’s application for renewal of its design patent because the design contained a Confederate flag. With Senator Barbara Mikulski, in 1993 she broke the ban on women wearing pants on the Senate floor, which was finally amended in 1994 to allow pants on the floor as long they were worn with a jacket. Moseley Braun delivered the eulogy for Thurgood Marshall in 1993.
- August 16, 1957 – Laura Innes born, American actress and television director; played Dr. Kerry Weaver on the TV drama ER (1995-2007). An advocate for persons with disabilities, as a director she helps them find employment, and supports the Performers with Disabilities Committee of the Screen Actors Guild.
- August 16, 1958 – Angela Bassett born, African American actress and activist, known for her performances in the biopics What’s Love Got to Do with It as Tina Turner, Malcolm X as Betty Shabazz, and Betty & Coretta as Coretta Scott King. She also played the title role in the television film The Rosa Parks Story, for which she won a 2003 Black Reel Award. She is a supporter of arts programs for youth, and programs for children with diabetes, and an Ambassador for UNICEF. She contributed to Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns and made appearances to urge people to vote. She also endorsed Hilary Clinton for president in 2016, and introduced survivors of the 2015 Charleston church shooting at the 2016 Democratic National Convention.
- August 16, 1960 – Rosita Baltazar born in Guatemala, Belizean Garifuna choreographer, dancer, dance instructor and founding assistant director of the Belize National Dance Company in 1990. In 2009 she was honored with the Chatoyer Recognition Award from the National Garifuna Council of Belize for her efforts at preserving Garifuna culture. The Garifuna are a mixed indigenous people originally from the Caribbean island of St. Vincent, who speak an eponymous Arawakan language.
- August 16, 1990 – Rina Sawayama born, Japanese-British singer-songwriter and producer; known for “Hold the Girl.”
- August 16, 2002 – The Africa Women’s Peace Train leaves Kampala, Uganda, to run through Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Mozambique, Botswana and finally to Johannesburg in South Africa, for the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD). Their goal was to bring an end to the civil wars, corruption, and genocide which make their families unsafe.
- August 16, 2019 – After India revoked the limited autonomy status of Kashmir on August 4, thousands of Indian troops were sent in, who arrested political leaders, imposed a strict curfew, and shut down telecommunications and internet access. Iltija Mufti, daughter of Mehbooba Mufti, former chief minister of Kashmir, was reached by the Guardian on this day while under house arrest. She pleaded for the international community to act over the unprecedented clampdown on millions of Kashmiris, warning they are being “caged like animals” and treated as “cannon fodder.” She said as many as 25 armed security personnel had surrounded her house the previous week, locking all entrances. The government of Pakistan protested, and downgraded its diplomatic relations with India. Kashmir has long been a disputed territory between Indian and Pakistan. There were over 700 protests in Kashmir’s main city of Srinagar just since the August 4 takeover and August 16, and about 200 civilians and 415 security forces have been wounded or injured.
- August 16, 2020 – Belarusian officials say Alexander Taraikovsky was killed when an explosive device that he intended to throw at police blew up in his hand during growing protests in Minsk against President Alexander Lukashenko, who claimed he won 80% of the vote in the recent election, as well as the violent crackdown by riot police on protesters. But Taraikovsky’s partner Elena German, who saw his body at the morgue, said, “There is a seam in the chest area – the hole was sewn up, but there is a black bruise; it’s small but we noticed. His hands and feet are completely intact, there are not even bruises. Obviously, it was a shot right in the chest.” Video taken by an Associated Press journalist showed Taraikovsky with a bloodied shirt before collapsing on the ground. Several police then walked over to where Taraikovsky was lying on the street and stood around him. The video didn’t show why he fell to the ground or how his shirt became bloodied, but it also didn’t show an explosive device, and his hands are both intact. German is seeking a full investigation, calling on a Belarusian human rights organization and international experts for support. “I am feeling outraged. I’m angry. That is why I want to achieve justice,” she said. “In fact, I am very scared. I was left alone, without support. I feel empty.”
- August 16, 2021 – As the Garrick, one of London’s last remaining gentlemen-only clubs, celebrates its 190th anniversary, a growing number of women barristers and judges are signing a petition calling on the club to change its rules. It is a frequent meeting place for cabinet ministers, supreme court judges, academics, diplomats, senior civil servants, journalists, and well-known actors and writers. While club rules ban talking about work on the premises, most members recognise that this rule does not preclude more subtle forms of networking. Emily Blendell, founder and CEO of a successful women’s wear company, who started the petition, said, “The issue is most apparent in the legal community. With so many senior members of the judiciary [being club] members, it is a concern that women can’t access the club … these subtle discriminations continue to impair our progression.” Actor Nigel Havers, a Garrick member, signed the petition, saying, “Surely it is time for the Garrick to haul itself into the 21st century.”
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Sources
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The Feminist Cats Learn About
Women’s Equality Day
In 1971, Representative Bella Abzug of New York championed a bill in the U.S. Congress to designate August 26 as Women’s Equality Day in the United States. It is the day in history when the 19th Amendment was finally ratified – August 26, 1920 – giving American women the right to vote. August 26 had previously been unofficially known as Suffrage Day, Woman Suffrage Ratification Day, and Women’s Emancipation Day, but was mainly celebrated by feminists associated with the National Women’s Party (1916-1997), founded by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, to focus on passing a woman suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution, rather than remain part of the fight to gain voting rights for women on a state-by-state basis.
This is not a federal holiday – nobody gets a day off. There are no U.S. federal holidays that honor women or their contributions to the making of America. It is just a day when the President issues a proclamation.
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This is the proclamation issued by President Joe Biden in 2022:
With the ratification of the 19th Amendment, millions of women across the country were finally able to make their voices heard in our elections. Yet many women of color who helped lead the universal suffrage movement were effectively denied those rights until the Voting Rights Act passed 45 years later. Today, the struggle to ensure that every American can cast their ballot continues. More Americans voted in 2020 than during any election in our history, but some States are restricting this fundamental right through provisions that overwhelmingly impact people of color, low-income communities, and people with disabilities. Women are less likely to have time to vote in-person with increased caregiving demands and a disproportionate share of low-wage, inflexible work. The right to vote and to have that vote counted is essential to the future of our democracy.
Women and girls have fought for social justice and freedom throughout our history, and my Administration is committed to building on their progress. All Americans should have the opportunity to fully participate in society — no one’s rights should be denied because of their gender. As States across the country strip women of their ability to make decisions about their own bodies, families, and futures, my Administration remains dedicated to protecting access to critical reproductive health care, regardless of gender, race, zip code, or income. We will continue to defend the right of all people to live free from gender-based violence.
We are also committed to ensuring women are treated fairly in the workplace and have economic security. We will fight for pay equity, to end discrimination in the workplace, and to promote equitable access to good-paying jobs, particularly in sectors where women are underrepresented. We remain dedicated to lowering the costs of child care and passing policies to help women navigate caregiving and work responsibilities.
On Women’s Equality Day, we celebrate the trailblazers who fought to deliver a better future for America’s daughters. We recognize the work that remains to ensure that everyone can fully participate in our democracy and make fundamental choices about their health and bodies. We strive to uphold our Nation’s promise of equality for all people.
NOW, THEREFORE, I, JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR., President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim August 26, 2022, as Women’s Equality Day. I call upon the people of the United States to celebrate and continue to build on our country’s progress towards gender equality, and to defend and strengthen the right to vote.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this twenty-fifth day of August, in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty-two, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and forty-seventh.
JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR.
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Nicely done, Mr. President.
However, as things stand, the only right which is enshrined in our Constitution specifically for women is the right to vote. We are still being treated by too many men as a sub-species rather than as Human Beings, so we need a lot more that nice words, especially when you issued this proclamation less than two months after Roe v. Wade was overturned.
Of course, even as President of the United States, you don’t have the power to grant women equal rights, but something a little more rallying would be appreciated. I hope your 2023 proclamation will be a call to action.
I’ll borrow the old slogan from our British sisters in the WSPU who also fought hard and suffered greatly for the right to vote:
Deeds, Not Words!
For those of you who want to dive deeper,
the extended list of this week’s
Women Trailblazers and Events
in Women’s History is here:
www.dailykos.com/...