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

**Trailblazing Women and Events in Our History**

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

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August 25, 1828 – Jane Lathrop Stanford born, American educator and philanthropist, co-founder of Stanford University; she funded and operated the university after her husband’s death in order to keep it open. Her death by strychnine poisoning in 1905, almost certainly a murder, was disputed by Stanford President David Starr Jordan, trying to hush up the scandal. He hired a doctor to state that her death was caused by heart failure, not poison, in spite of the findings of the coroner. Her murder has never been solved.

August 25, 1845 – Judith Gautier born, French poet, translator, and historical novelist. She was an Oriental scholar and her works dealt mainly with Chinese and Japanese themes. Her translations were among the earliest to bring Chinese and Japanese poetry to the attention of modern European poets. The poems in her collection, Le Livre de Jade (The Book of Jade), were freely adapted from Chinese originals. She was a member of the Académie Goncourt (1910-1917).

August 25, 1860 – Henrietta Vinton Davis born, black American dramatic reader-actor, elocutionist, and the first international organizer for Marcus Garvey’s African Redemption Movement She was a signer of the Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World, and an officer in the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL), and later the rival UNIA, Inc.

August 25, 1900 – Isobel Hogg Kerr Beattie born, Scottish architect, likely the first professional woman architect in Scotland; after graduating from the Edinburgh College of Art in 1926, she briefly worked in an office, then set up independently (1928-1929) before returning to the College of Art to get an advanced degree. She then worked for the Edinburgh firm Jamieson & Arnott, and was admitted as an Associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1931.

August 25, 1910 – Dorothea Tanning born, American painter, sculptor, theatrical designer, and author who started writing poetry in her 80s.

Dorothea Tanning — ‘Arizona Landscape’ (1943)

August 25, 1925 – Thea Astley born, Australian novelist and short story writer, who sometimes used the pen name Philip Cressy (she sold her first poem under that name because men were paid ₤5, but women were only paid ₤3); Astley won Australia’s major literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award, four times, more than any other Australian writer, at a time when the Australian literary scene was heavily dominated by men; noted for The Well Dressed Explorer, The Slow Natives, The Acolyte, The Kindness Cup, and Drylands.

August 25, 1927 – Althea Gibson born, American tennis player, the first black athlete to break the color barrier in international tennis, and in 1956, the first African American to win a Grand Slam title (French championships). She won Wimbledon and the U.S. Nationals in 1957 and 1958. Gibson later became the first black player to compete on the LPGA (Ladies Professional Golf Association) Tour. At the 2019 US Open tennis tournament, a sculpture honoring Althea Gibson was unveiled outside Arthur Ashe Stadium.

August 25, 1934 – Lise Bacon born, French Canadian Liberal politician; Member of the National Assembly of Quebec (1973-1976 and 1981-1994); Secretary of State for Social Affairs (1973-1975); Minister of Consumers, Co-operatives and Financial Institutions (1975-1976); Minister of the Environment (1988-1989); Senator (1994-2009).

August 25, 1937 – Virginia Euwer Wolff born, American children’s author; noted for her award-winning series Make Lemonade.

August 25, 1944 – Sherley Anne Williams born, African American poet, novelist, and social critic; noted for The Peacock Poems, her novel Dessa Rose, and the non-fiction Give Birth to Brightness: A Thematic Study of Neo-Black Literature.

August 25, 1945 – Hannah L. Shearer born, American television writer and producer; writer-producer for the TV series Emergency!; wrote episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

August 25, 1959 – Ruth Ann Swenson born, American coloratura soprano; she made her debut in 1983 with the San Francisco Opera, made many appearances at the New York’s Metropolitan Opera, as well as opera stages across Europe. In 2006, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and underwent surgery, but was back on the stage at the Met in March 2007, singing the demanding role of Marguerite in Faust.

August 25, 1962 – Taslima Nasrin born, Bangladeshi author, poet, and physician who has been in exile since 1994. Her first writings were mainly poetry, often about female oppression and written in graphic language. In the early 1990s, she published three collections of essays and three novels. In 1993, her novel Lajja (Shame), about a Hindu family attacked by Muslims, radically changed her life. Muslims, outraged by her negative portrayal of Islamic philosophy, called for a ban of the novel, and she was physically attacked. The Council of Islamic Soldiers, a radical fundamentalist group, offered a bounty for her death. In 1994, she was misquoted in a newspaper interview, and was charged with “making inflammatory statements.” Thousands of demonstrators labeled her “an apostate” who vilified Islam. After two months in hiding, she escaped to Sweden, ceasing her medical practice to become a full-time writer, and an activist for women’s rights and freedom of expression. When her Bangladeshi passport was revoked, she was granted citizenship by Sweden, and spent time in Western Europe and America. She has also lived at times in India, but her books continue to be feminist, frank about her sexuality, and critical of the Islamic subjugation of women, so the protests, banning of her books, and fatwahs calling for her death have continued. She has been honored with numerous awards, from a 1994 Human Rights Award from the French government, to the 1994 Kurt Tucholsky Prize from Swedish PEN, the 1994 Feminist of the Year from Feminist Majority Foundation, and the 2002 Freethought Heroine Award from the Freedom from Religion Foundation.

August 25, 1963 – Tiina Intelmann born, Estonian diplomat; Estonian ambassador to the United Kingdom since 2017; appointed as head of the EU Delegation to Somalia, effective September, 2021; head of the EU Delegation to Liberia (2014-2021); the first woman President of the Assembly of States Parties of the International Criminal Court (2011-2014); Estonia’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations (2005-2011).

August 25, 1969 – Olga Konkova born in Moscow, Russian-Norwegian jazz and classical pianist and jazz-based composer and collaborator.

August 25, 1981 – Claire Oliver born, Australian cancer activist who campaigned to raise awareness of the dangers of solariums (tanning beds). She was 21 years old when her melanoma was discovered in 2002 during a health check-up when she was hired by SBS Television. She had spent time both in solariums and tanning on the beach. On August 22, 2007, she wrote an open letter announcing she had only days to live, and that her goal was to reach her 26^th birthday. She did reach her birthday, but died on September 13, 2007. Since then, solariums had been either banned or their use restricted in the Australian states of Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, New South Wales, and Western Australia.

August 25, 2010 – Human Rights Watch issued a report on discrimination and violence against women with disabilities in Northern Uganda. After 20 years of displacement and war, the people of northern Uganda were leaving camps set up for internally displaced people and trying to build new lives. About 20% of all Ugandans have disabilities, many due to the war. In northern Uganda, the Lord’s Resistance Army set fire to buildings with people inside and shot civilians. Because of landmines or gunshot wounds, many women lost the use of limbs, were blinded, or lost hearing, and some contracted diseases like polio because vaccines were unavailable in the war zone. Women with disabilities face an even more complex and grueling process of return and relocation than their neighbors. They are often subject to social stigma, and sexual violence, and are denied access to justice. They have specific needs for reproductive and maternal health care that are rarely met. The conflict and the movement of people have eroded the community networks that might have bolstered them in the past. They are frequently abandoned, facing isolation and abuse. There are often no sources of clean water, and no services like police or health clinics. The government has done almost nothing to combat the discriminatory attitudes toward the disabled, or to provide them with assistance in relocating from the temporary refugee camps. Women with disabilities are too often excluded from community meetings and rarely take any part in decision-making on important issues such as the return process or public health. Under the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), and the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, three treaties that Uganda has ratified, the government has an obligation to take all appropriate measures to eliminate discrimination by any party, including by private individuals. Over one-third of the 64 women and girls with disabilities interviewed by Human Rights Watch reported that they had experienced some form of sexual and gender-based violence, including rape. Several of the interviewees said that they had tried to seek justice for sexual and gender-based violence but failed. Sometimes local councilors discouraged them from reporting incidents to police and instead pressed for informal mediation, which did not result in changes in behavior and allowed the violence to continue. A number of well-documented factors have made it virtually impossible to successfully prosecute rape for all women. These include police corruption, the lack of necessary police forms to file cases, the requirement for medical examination, and the reluctance of some medical examiners to testify during trials. The judicial system’s barriers to effective prosecution are compounded for women with disabilities, who may be unable to communicate to others that they were raped, or to travel to police posts.

August 25, 2011 – A report on the Status of Women in the U.S. from the Women’s Foundation of California noted that the U.S. ranks 71st in the world in the number of women holding political office, with only six states having women governors, just 15% of cities with women mayors, while 24% of state legislators are women. Judy Patrick, CEO and President of the foundation said, “The thing is, not just women lose when there isn’t more equal representation. Communities lose.” She added, “Women’s attitudes about public policies differ. They tend to believe in a more activist role of government. They tend to oppose military intervention. They support restricting firearms. They support programs guaranteeing good health care and the meeting of people’s basic needs. And they support efforts to achieve racial equality.”

August 25, 2016 – The Department of Homeland Security officials launched an investigation into the hacking of comedian Leslie Jones' iCloud account. Hackers had posted nude photos of the Ghostbusters star, some of her personal information, and a racist video tribute to the dead gorilla Harambe on Jones' website. In July, 2016, Jones was subjected to such a barrage of online abuse that she briefly left Twitter. She returned after the site banned Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos, whose fans heaped insults on Jones after he wrote a scathing review of the 2016 version of Ghostbusters.

August 25, 2018 – Zelda Perkins, a former employee of Miramax, spoke before the British Parliament, revealing how Harvey Weinstein used legal contracts to keep harassment victims quiet. She has been campaigning for changes in legislation on non-disclosure agreements. In autumn of 2017, Perkins broke a 20-year silence, and revealed in an interview with the Financial Times that she had signed a non-disclosure agreement with Weinstein and Miramax in 1998. She stated that she and a colleague had been victims of harassment by Mr. Weinstein, and had gone through three days of "demoralizing" and intense negotiations with Weinstein’s lawyers. The settlement placed strict restrictions on Perkins, prohibiting her from speaking to friends, colleagues, or family about her experiences with Weinstein, but also to any professionals, including medical practitioners, unless they themselves had signed an NDA. Such restrictions meant that Perkins’ colleague — who she said Weinstein had attempted to rape — couldn’t see a trauma counselor without them signing an NDA. “She never discussed it, because she was so afraid,” Perkins said, who assumed that breaking the NDA would result in jail time. "I was basically told the best thing was to erase the past four years of my life from memory." Perkins added that despite allegations of a “criminal act,” she was told any attempt to take the matter to court would result in her being “utterly crushed,” given the “disparity of power between myself and Weinstein and Disney.” Disney owned Miramax at the time. She hoped that insisting on adding obligations to the NDA would restrict Weinstein from continuing what she has described as predatory and illegal behavior. These included therapy sessions for the producer and the use of three complaint handlers within Miramax, one of whom had to be an attorney. Were any further damages to be brought against Weinstein over the following two years, she said the agreement stated that Perkins’ case would be “disclosed to Disney or Harvey would be fired.” However, she said that these obligations weren’t met, and she stopped checking after 12 months, having left the industry and the U.K. “Essentially, we were defrauded,” she said. She left the industry because in the months after signing the NDA, during her interviews for jobs within the industry, “it was suggested that I'd clearly been having an affair with Harvey and asked whether this would be a problem in the future." To her, this was the "most insulting thing that could happen," and she not only left the industry, she left the UK for five years. "I don't think my colleague has ever returned," she said.

August 25, 2020 – Bank of America announced it is partnering with Athena Alliance, a digital community of top executive women, to diversify its membership base, and will commit $100,000 to Athena’s newly formed Access Fellowship Fund. Bank of America’s partnership with Athena will sponsor 240 multicultural women, allowing them to become members of Athena Alliance at no cost and giving them access to the broad range of development tools and learning resources included in the Access Fellowship. “We believe the demographics at the top of business need to mimic the demographics of the society business serves. To do this, Athena’s goal is to have 40% of its membership comprised of underrepresented women,” said Athena Founder and CEO Coco Brown. “Our partnership with Bank of America will enable us to diversify the women we support by sponsoring more women of color into our program. We’re thrilled that the bank has stepped up to take a leadership role in this effort.” Brown added, “We’re committed to championing these women and addressing their needs, while honoring their collective wisdom and power in helping Athena shape and influence equity in the C-suite and the modern boardroom.”

August 25, 2021 – Sharon Graham was elected to as General Secretary of Unite the Union, Great Britain’s second largest trade union, the first woman to lead the union. She had been head of Unite’s organizing, or “leverage” department, its industrial action wing. Graham was pressured to withdraw her candidacy, and subjected to misogynistic slurs and mocked-up pictures of her as Margaret Thatcher, she responded, “If you’re a woman in a leadership role, it’s all the usual sexist stuff that you hear. It will never deter me. Maybe they’re a bit worried I might win.” Her campaign message, “It’s Westminster versus the workplace: back to the workplace” spoke to grassroots members. Graham grew up in Hammersmith, west London, and left school at age 16 to work in the hospitality industry. She led her first successful walkout a year later, during an unofficial strike to defend the rights of casual workers. “I’ll never forget that. I was 17. How I got away with it I don’t know but I did. You can’t persuade employers just by the weight of argument. The restaurant owner ignored us for months but did a deal after the walkout.” At age 27, she attended the Trades Union Congress Organising Academy, and for the past 20 years she has worked for what is now Unite, first at the Transport and General Workers’ Union before it merged with Amicus to become Unite. Graham built a reputation as a highly skilled negotiator, and as head of Unite’s organising department is credited with 15 major victories, often using strategies that go beyond the traditional approach. During last year’s “fire and rehire” dispute with British Airways, MPs were asked to support motions against the airline’s tactics, followed by warnings to its owner International Airlines Group, that it could lose landing slots at Heathrow. She is also working on some collective bargaining home-working agreements, with particular focus on the impact on women. “I was home working and part going-out and my little one was home schooling. Actually the burden often does fall on women, we’re juggling all of these things around.” Her motivation, she said, is “simple beliefs” that trade unions exist to fight bad employers, and building the strength of the union in the workplace. The fight for jobs, pay, and conditions is, she says, what it says “on the union tin.”

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August 26, 1695 – Marie-Anne Catherine Quinault born, French singer at the Paris Opera and the Comédie-Française. She was also a composer, who composed motets for the Royal Chapel at Versailles, and was the first woman awarded the Order of Saint Michael, the precursor of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

August 26, 1789 – France’s National Constituent Assembly approves the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be based only on common utility." But only men could be citizens. After the Women’s March on Versailles in October 1789, women presented the Women's Petition to the National Assembly in which they proposed a decree giving women equal rights. In 1790, Nicolas de Condorcet and Etta Palm d'Aelders called in vain on the National Assembly to extend civil and political rights to women. Condorcet declared that "he who votes against the right of another, whatever the religion, color, or sex of that other, has henceforth abjured his own." This prompted Olympe de Gouges to publish the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen in September 1791. She became more vehement in her writing, and in June, 1793, she was arrested. She spent three months in prison, denied an attorney by the presiding judge on the grounds that she was more than capable of defending herself. She was sentenced to death by the Revolutionary Tribunal on November 3, 1793, and sent to the guillotine the same day. French women finally won the right to vote in 1944, and voted for the first time on April 29, 1945. In 2014, 73% of the National Assembly members, and 78% of the Senate were still men.

August 26, 1827 – Annie Turner Wittenmyer born, American social reformer, author, magazine editor, and relief worker. She started a free school for underprivileged children. During the U.S. Civil War, she was a field agent for the Ladies’ Soldiers’ Aid Society, and became a post-war advocate for war orphans. Wittenmyer was the first President of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (1874-1879).

August 26, 1874 – Zona Gale born, American author and playwright; in 1921, she was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, for her adaptation of her novel, Miss Lulu Bett. She was a National Woman’s Party member who lobbied extensively for the 1921 Wisconsin Equal Rights Law.

August 26, 1878 – Lina Solomonovna Stern born, Soviet scientist and humanist, did pioneering work on the blood-brain barrier; her medical discoveries saved thousands of lives during WWII; first woman to reach professional rank at the University of Geneva, as a Professor of Chemico-Physiology, while she was researching cellular oxidation. She was accused in 1949 by the USSR of belonging to a Zionist organization, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, she was tried and sentenced to prison, then exile, but was freed and reinstated in 1953.

August 26, 1892 – Elizabeth Smith Friedman born, American expert cryptanalyst and author; she graduated in 1915 with a degree in English, but also studied Latin, Greek and German. In 1916, George Fabian, owner of Riverbank Laboratories, one of the first U.S. facilities founded to study cryptography, hired her to assist Elizabeth Wells Gallup in her attempt to prove that Sir Francis Bacon was the real author of Shakespeare’s works, by decrypting supposed enciphered messages contained in the plays and poems. Riverbank gathered much historical information on secret writing. During WWI, Riverbank was the only U.S. facility capable of solving enciphered messages, until the Army’s Cipher Bureau was founded in 1917, and began to have some success. She worked with, and married, William F. Friedman at Riverbank from 1917 until 1921, when they left to work for the War Department in Washington DC. Although she worked closely with her husband as part of a team, her contributions to cryptology were unique. In 1923, she was hired by the U.S. Navy. In 1927, she worked with the U.S Treasury Department’s Bureau of Prohibition and Customs, decoding messages used by bootleggers during Prohibition, and codes used by smugglers, for a joint operation with the Coast Guard Intelligence Division. Her work between 1927 and 1939 involved overlapping operations of the U.S. Coast Guard, the Bureau of Narcotics, the Bureau of Internal Revenue, the Bureau of Prohibition and Customs, and the Department of Justice. By 1931, she was one of the people who convinced Congress that a separate cryptanalytic section was needed, with more people trained to do the work. She was often called to testify in cases against accused parties, resulting in 1933 alone in convictions against 35 bootlegging ringleaders who violated the Volstead Act. The Canadian government sought her help in 1937 in a case involving opium dealing. Her solution to the complex Chinese enciphered code led to successful convictions. During WWII, her Coast Guard unit was transferred to the Navy, and worked on the Enigma machine code used by German Naval Intelligence. After retirement, she and her husband collaborated on a manuscript which was published as The Shakespeare Ciphers Examined, which won awards from the Folger Shakespeare Library and the American Shakespeare Theatre and Academy. The Friedmans completely disproved the Baconian cipher theory with technical proficiency.

August 26, 1898 – Marguerite “Peggy” Guggenheim born, American art collector and socialite. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is a modern art museum on the Grand Canal in Venice, one of the most important museums in Italy for European and American art of the first half of the 20th century.

August 26, 1900 – Margaret Utinsky born, American nurse who worked with the Filipino resistance movement to provide medicine, food, and other items to aid Allied prisoners of war in the Philippines during WWII. She was recognized in 1946 with the Medal of Freedom for her actions.

August 26, 1901 – Eleanor Dark born, Australian historical novelist; The Timeless Land, Prelude to Christopher and Return to Coolami; she won the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal for literature twice.

August 26, 1903 – Caroline Pafford Miller born, American author, noted for gathering folktales, stories, and archaic dialects of the rural communities she visited in her home state of Georgia in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and wove them into her work. She won 1934 Pulitzer Prize and the Prix Femina for her first novel Lamb in His Bosom.

August 26, 1908 – Cynthia Wedel born, first woman elected President of the National Council of Churches (1969-1972), and president of the World Council of Churches (1975-1983), argued that women should be treated as equals in the church.

August 26, 1918 – Katherine Goble Johnson born, African American mathematician whose calculations of orbital mechanics for NASA were critical to the success of the first and subsequent U.S. manned spaceflights. During her 35-year career at NASA and its predecessor, NACA, she mastered complex manual calculations, including calculating trajectories, launch windows and emergency return paths for Project Mercury spaceflights, and rendezvous paths for the Apollo lunar lander and command module on flights to the Moon. Her calculations were also critical during the early stages of the Space Shuttle program, and she worked on plans for a mission to Mars. Honored in 2015 with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama. She and her colleagues were the inspiration for the book and the hit movie, Hidden Figures.

August 26, 1920 – The 19th Amendment of U.S. Constitution officially certified as ratified: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” 72 years after the Seneca Falls Convention, American women are finally acknowledged as having this basic right of citizens.

August 26, 1925 – Etelka Keserű born, Hungarian economist and Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party politician, Minister of Light Industry (1971-1980), after serving as the Deputy Minister of Light Industry (1967-1971); member of the Hungarian Women’s National Council (1971-1990).

August 26, 1926 – Anahit Tsitsikian born, notable Armenian violinist, and music scholar who specialized in Armenian musicology and ancient music history; founder of a branch of Armenian musical archaeology.

August 26, 1935 – Geraldine Ferraro born, American attorney, author and politician, member of U.S. House of Representatives (D-NY 1979-1985); in 1984, she became the first woman to run as vice president for a major U.S. political party; served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Commission in Human Rights (1993-1996).

August 26, 1935 – Karen Spärck Jones born, British computer scientist, worked on natural language processing and information retrieval; noted for the concept of inverse document frequency, a technology which is the basis of most modern search engines; outspoken advocate for women’s careers in computing; fellow and Vice President (2000-2002) of the British Academy; President of the Association for Computational Linguistics (1994), and recipient of its 2004 Lifetime Achievement Award; also honored with the British Computer Society 2007 Lovelace Medal.

August 26, 1944 – Dame Judith A. Rees born, geographer; interim Director of London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE – 2001-2012) and Director of LSE’s ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy (hosted jointly with University of Leeds), and of Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment; appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 2013.

August 26, 1956 – Sally Beamish born, British composer and violist, formerly with the Raphael Ensemble; recipient of the 1993 Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for outstanding achievement in composition.

YouTube Video

August 26, 1957 – Nikky Finney born, American poet; raised by parents active in the Civil Rights Movement, she is an advocate for social justice and cultural preservation; Guy Davenport Endowed Professor of English at the University of Kentucky (1993-2013); author of four books of poetry, Finney won the 2011 National Book Award for Head Off & Split, and the 1999 PEN/Beyond Margins Award.

August 26, 1964 – Allegra Huston born in England, New Mexico-based novelist, non-fiction and screenplay writer; noted for Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found, Bloomsbury, and her novel, Say My Name.

August 26, 1964 – Mehriban Aliyeva born, Azerbaijani physician and ophthalmologist; her appointment as the first Vice President of Azerbaijan in 2017 by her husband, President Ilham Aliyev, while she continues as the First Lady of Azerbaijan, a position she assumed in 2003, has caused controversy. She has been a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador since 2004, honoring her promotion of Azerbaijan’s cultural heritage.

August 26, 1964 – Daphne Caruana Galizia born, Maltese investigative journalist, blogger, and columnist. She exposed government corruption, nepotism, patronage, money laundering, links between Malta's online gambling industry and organized crime, Malta's citizenship-by-investment scheme, and connections of government officials and prominent Maltese businessmen to the international Panama Papers scandal. On October 16, 2017, she was killed when a car bomb was detonated inside her vehicle. An investigation was launched, which involved forensic investigation teams from the U.S., the Netherlands, and Europol. In December 2017, three men were arrested in connection with the car bomb attack. In April 2018, an international consortium of 45 journalists published The Daphne Project, a collaboration to complete her investigative work. The GUE/NGL Award for Journalists, Whistleblowers & Defenders of the Right to Information was established in 2018 in honor of Galizia. As of June 2019, none of the three suspects had been brought to trial, and none of the intermediaries and instigators had been identified.

August 26, 1970 – Melissa McCarthy born, American comedian, writer, actress and producer. She is co-founder with her husband, comedian Ben Falcone, of On the Day Productions, which has produced several comedy films. She won a 2011 Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series for the sitcom Mike & Molly (2010-2016); also known for the movies Bridesmaids, Identity Thief, and Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Melissa Mccarthy — 2016 photo by Gregg Deguire

August 26, 1970 – Betty Friedan opens a nationwide protest called the Women’s Strike for Equality in New York City on the fiftieth anniversary of women’s suffrage, sponsored by the National Organization for Women. There were 20,000 activists on Fifth Avenue on New York City, 5,000 on Boston Common, 2,000 in San Francisco’s Union Square, and 1,000 in Washington DC. Smaller groups participated in Syracuse and Manhasset in NY State, and in Detroit, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and Saint Louis. Signs carried by activists included ‘Don't iron while the strike is hot’ and ‘We are the 51% minority.’

August 26, 1971 – The first Women’s Equality Day, initiated by Representative Bella Abzug (Democrat-New York), is established by Presidential Proclamation, now reaffirmed annually.

August 26, 1980 – Neeru Bajwa born in British Columbia, Canada; Canadian actress, director, and producer who moved to Bombay in 1999, and is mainly known for her work on Punjabi and Hindi films. She founded her own production company, Meeru Bajwa Entertainment, which has produced several films, and in 2017, she made her feature film directing debut with Sargi.

August 26, 1989 – Mayumi Moriyama is appointed chief cabinet secretary by Toshiki Kaifu, the first woman to hold this position. In 1992, she becomes the first woman Minister of Education in Japan.

August 26, 1990 – Raven Leilani, born as Raven Leilani Baptiste, African American novelist, short story writer, and visual artist; her debut novel, Luster, was published December, 2020, to critical acclaim, and was awarded the John Leonard Prize by the National Book Critics Circle.

August 26, 2016 – France’s Council of State ruled against a controversial burkini ban, which outlawed a full-coverage swimsuit worn mostly by Muslim women. While the court’s decision only suspends the ban in the town of Villeneuve-Loubet, it has the potential to reverse the estimated 30 bans already installed in other cities and once again allow women to wear the body-covering swimsuits on the beaches. French mayors claimed the ban of the swimsuit was because of “growing terror concerns,” but the court ruled it “seriously and clearly illegally breached fundamental freedoms.” This was a temporary ruling, and the controversy remains unresolved as many French cities continue to enforce burkini bans.

August 26, 2020 – Chantelle Doyle, Australian environmental scientist, spoke publicly about her encounter with a shark while surfing. Her leg below the knee was severely damaged. She has since undergone two major surgeries, and faced additional surgeries, to repair the extensive damage to her leg. But she and her partner, husband Mark Rapley, who repeatedly punched the shark in the face to make it let go of Doyle, started a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for the Australian Marine Conservation Society, using the hash tag #punching for healthy oceans. “We’re not suddenly shark evangelists,” she says. “But they are a keystone species and we want our kids to have a nicer environment. I’ve seen the Great Barrier Reef collapsing. I think I’m more interested in sharks now. I’m a scientist but I work on terrestrial areas and hadn’t done much marine work. I’m actually proud that Australia has marine systems that are healthy and sharks are an integral part of that ... I wanted to call out to people and say, if you have this niggle of guilt that you should be doing something better, then listen to that niggle and act. Whether it’s picking up rubbish or putting those solar panels up. We want this to encourage everyone to just be the best version of themselves. We all know when we’re taking the easy option.”

August 26, 2021 – Afsana Hamidy arrived safely in the UK after being airlifted out of Afghanistan. She is one of 35 Afghan scholars who are part of the Chevening programme, which funds one-year master’s degrees at UK universities. Some of the other scholars in the programme are still stuck in Afghanistan, and have gone into hiding. The Foreign Office blocked the Chevening students from taking up their UK government-sponsored scholarships earlier this month, saying it would be unable to process their visas in time. Hamidy said the decision left her feeling “traumatised and stressful.” She feared being trapped in Afghanistan and targeted by the Taliban because of their opposition to women’s education. Eventually the Foreign Office relented, but just getting to the Kabul airport was a nightmare, and she was jammed with over 600 other people into a military plane. After arriving in the UK, she was transferred to a nearby hotel to quarantine for 10 days under Covid rules. She has been overwhelmed by the supportive messages she has received from the public. “I didn’t imagine that the UK people would welcome me so warmly. I was afraid, I didn’t know how I would feel. Will the UK become my home, my second country, or not?” she said. “But since yesterday, the messages that I have received … their warm welcome and their nice attitudes makes this somehow feel like home. But I do have concern about my friends, my colleagues, the world where I have lived for a long time ... I have a punishment feeling for myself because I left for a richer, safe country, but I couldn’t help others ...Their lives are in danger, so I’m nervous about them and their future,” she said, adding she was particularly worried for young girls and families financially supported by women. “If they are not allowed to continue working, then I really don’t know what will happen.”

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August 27, 1796 – Sophia Smith born, benefactor of Smith College for women, which was founded in 1871, the year after her death, in Northampton, Connecticut.

August 27, 1805 – Sallie Gordon Law born, first recorded Confederate nurse in the Civil War; she was president of the Southern Mothers’ Association in Memphis, Tennessee, which set up the Southern Mothers’ Hospital for sick and wounded Confederate soldiers early in 1861, and later also treated Union prisoners. Originally having only 12 beds, the hospital moved several times to larger spaces, growing to over 100 beds. The hospital was closed in 1862 when General William T. Sherman became military governor of occupied Memphis. Law then collected medical supplies, food, and clothing which she carried to Confederate field hospitals, mostly in Georgia.

August 27, 1833 – Margarethe Meyer Schurz born, German-American educator, after setting up several kindergartens in the German states and in England, she emigrated to America, and opened the first German-language kindergarten in the U.S., at Watertown, Wisconsin in 1854, and won Elizabeth Peabody, prominent in the Transcendentalist movement, to the kindergarten cause. In 1860, Elizabeth Peabody opened the first English-language kindergarten in the United States.

August 27, 1872 – Mary Anderson born, American labor leader and activist, Women’s Trade Union League, first director of Women’s Bureau in the U.S. Department of Labor.

August 27, 1875 – Katharine McCormick born, American biologist, philanthropist, and women’s rights activist; as an undergraduate at MIT, she refused to wear the fashionable ladies’ hats required by the administration, arguing that the feathers in vogue at the time were a fire hazard in the laboratories – and the requirement was rescinded. She was vice president and treasurer of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and funded its publication, The Woman’s Journal. She was a key organizer of Carrie Chapman Catt’s campaign for ratification of the 19^th Amendment, which is where she first met Margaret Sanger and became involved in promoting the legalization of birth control. After ratification of the 19^th Amendment, McCormack was the first vice president of the League of Women Voters, but also continued to work on birth control issues, even smuggling hundreds of diaphragms from Europe for Sanger’s Clinical Research Bureau. She established the Neuroendocrine Research Foundation (1927-1947) at Harvard which studied the link between endocrinology and mental illness. Beginning in the 1950s, she funded research into oral contraception from the development and testing of the first pill through the 1960s, providing almost $2 million USD (equivalent to $23 million today) to the Worchester Foundation for Experimental Biology. She also donated the money to build a woman’s dormitory at MIT which could house 200 students. Prior to this, housing for female students was limited to 50 women. This increased the number of women students at MIT from 3% of the student body to 40%. When she died in 1967, her will provided $5 million to the Stanford University School of Medicine to support female physicians, $5 million to Planned Parenthood Federation of America, which funded the Katharine Dexter McCormick Library in New York City, and $1 million to the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology.

August 27, 1886 – Rebecca Clarke born, English viola and violin player, and composer. She began as a violinist, and her family supported her talent. After she was admitted to the Royal Academy, she switched to the viola. Clarke was one of the first women to become a professional player in an orchestra when she was hired by Sir Henry Wood to play in the Queen’s Hall Orchestra in 1912. She faced difficulties as a composer because some critics insisted that no woman could have written such quality work. In one contest, she submitted pieces under her own name, and one under the pseudonym of Anthony Trent. The piece by “Anthony Trent” was praised, while the works submitted under her own name were largely ignored. Clarke also played with American orchestras, and toured as a soloist.

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August 27, 1904 – Norah Lofts born, British author, known primarily for historical fiction, recipient of the National Book Award (from the American Booksellers Association).

August 27, 1924 – Rosalie E. Wahl born, American lawyer, judge, and peace activist; first woman named to the Minnesota Supreme Court (1977-1994); she was an Assistant State Public Defender (1967-1973). Her “feminist epiphany” came to her while sitting outside a closed meeting of the all-male Washington County Board in Minnesota in 1960. She was the head of a group of citizens presenting a proposal to the county board to expand from a single central library in Stillwater, the county seat, with a refurbished school bus as a bookmobile traveling the rest of the rural county once a month, to an integrated county system with branch libraries. The county had a healthy surplus, which would cover most of the start-up costs, and several county supervisors had promised her their vote. But after waiting in the hall, she was told, without explanation, that the board had rejected the proposal. “It was after that I decided to go to law school,” she would say later. “I was tired of sitting outside of doors, with the doors shut, and them deciding.” Throughout her career, Wahl was known for her commitment to equal justice for all, a leader of efforts to address gender and racial bias in the state’s justice system. In 2014, Her Honor: Rosalie Wahl and the Minnesota Women’s Movement, was published by Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist Lori Sturdevant.

August 27, 1927 – The “Famous Five” Canadian women file their petition to Supreme Court of Canada, asking, “Does the word ‘Persons’ in Section 24 of the British North America Act, 1867, include female persons?” The court ruled that women were not “persons” under the British North American Act. Thanks to their persistence, in 1929, the Privy Council of England would overrule the Supreme Court of Canada, and declare that women are ‘persons.’ This gave rise to the Canadian “living tree” doctrine of constitutional interpretation: a constitution is organic and must be read in a broad and progressive manner so as to adapt it to the changing times.

August 27, 1928 – Joan Kroc née Mansfield born, American philanthropist, married to Ray Kroc, founder of MacDonald’s. When he died in 1984, she inherited his fortune, and created the Joan B. Kroc Foundation, which in 1985 donated $18.5 million to San Diego Hospice for a multi-purpose hospice center. Also in San Diego, she funded the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice, the Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies at the University of San Diego, the St. Vincent de Paul Joan Kroc Center for the Homeless, and was a major contributor to the Kroc-Copley Animal Shelter. She also supported the Ronald McDonald Children’s Charities and Ronald McDonald Houses. Kroc spent millions of dollars on the campaign for nuclear disarmament in the 1980s, and donated $15 million to assist cities in North Dakota and Minnesota after a devastating 1997 flood. Upon her death in 2003, among her many bequests, National Public Radio (NPR) received $225 million, $1.6 billion went to the Salvation Army, and $10 million to the Zoological Society of San Diego.

August 27, 1932 – Antonia Fraser born, British historian and author, known for history, biographies, and detective fiction; she was honored with the 1969 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Mary, Queen of Scots; the 1984 Wolfson History Prize for The Weaker Vessel; and Crime Writers’ Association 1996 Macallan Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction for The Gunpowder Plot.

August 27, 1948 – Deborah A. Swallow born, English museum curator, historian and academic; director of the Courtauld Institute of Art since 2004; Keeper of the Asian Department and Director of Collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum (1983-2004); assistant curator of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Darwin College and lecturer at Girton College (1974-1983).

August 27, 1949 – Leah Jamieson born, American computer scientist, engineer, and academic; Dean of Engineering and Ransburg Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University; member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering; 2007 President of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE); founder of Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS), a multi-university engineering design teams program working with non-profit community organizations; recipient of the 2005 Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology and the 2007 Anita Borg Institute of Women Vision Award for Social Impact.

August 27, 1953 – Joan Alison Smith born, English novelist, non-fiction author, journalist, and human rights activist; on staff at The Sunday Times (1979-1984), and also a contributor for The Guardian and The New Statesman; known for her Loretta Lawson crime novels; feminist and atheist; outspoken supporter of Classics in state schools; 2015 chair of the Labour Humanists, which supports secularist policies and humanist values within the Labour Party.

August 27, 1959 – Denice Denton born, American electrical engineer, professor, and administrator; the first woman professor in engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to win tenure; Dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Washington (1996-2005), the first woman to lead an engineering college of a major research university; Chancellor of the University of California, Santa Cruz (2005-2006); while under treatment for depression, she committed suicide in 2006.

August 27, 1959 – Jeannette Winterson born, English writer, journalist, and organic delicatessen owner; noted for Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, which won the 1985 Whitbread Prize for First Novel; Written on the Body won the 1994 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, and Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? was awarded the 2013 Lambda for Lesbian Memoir or Biography.

August 27, 1968 – Daphne Koller born, Israeli-American Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University; co-founder of Coursera, an online education platform; noted for work on artificial intelligence and its applications to biomedical sciences; honored with the inaugural ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in Computing Sciences and the 2001 IJCAI Computers and Thought Award; member of the National Academy of Engineering since 2011.

August 27, 1976 – Audrey C. Delsanti born, French astronomer and biologist; awarded a NASA Postdoctoral Fellowship in astrobiology at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii in 2004; credited with discovery of two numbered minor planets, and co-discovery of the trans-Neptune object (40314) 1999 KR_16.

August 27, 1985 – Alexandra Nechita born, Romanian American cubist painter and sculptor; selected by the World Federation of United Nations Associations to lead a Global Arts initiative in 1999.

‘Eternal Embrace’ — by Alexandra Nechita

August 27, 1986 – Laura Bates born, English feminist writer; founder of the Everyday Sexism Project website in April 2012. Author of Everyday Sexism: The Project that Inspired a Worldwide Movement; Misogynation: The True Scale of Sexism; and Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists.

August 27, 2018 – Almost half of the maternity units at hospitals in England were closed to expectant mothers at least once during 2017, the Labour Party found through Freedom of Information requests, due to staff shortages, especially of midwives, and other resourcing problems. A total of 287 closings at 41 hospital trusts in 2017 were found, and eight closures lasted over 24 hours. Eleven hospitals shut down their units over 10 separate times. Royal College of Midwives CEO Gill Walton said, “We know trusts are facing huge pressures to save money demanded by the government, but this cannot be at the expense of safety. We remain 3500 midwives short in England and if some maternity units regularly have to close their doors it suggests there is an underlying problem around capacity staffing levels.” She added, “A priority going forward for all UK maternity services is continuity of care and this would ensure every woman has a named midwife during pregnancy and one-to-one care in labour, so it’s never been more crucial that we have enough midwives and MSWs in our maternity services.”

August 27, 2019 – Women who accused Jeffrey Epstein of sexually abusing them as teenagers testified at a special hearing in Manhattan. Epstein had committed suicide in a New York jail earlier in August. Federal judge Richard Berman, who was overseeing the case, scheduled the proceeding in light of Epstein’s death, giving his accusers the opportunity to speak. “Jeffrey Epstein sexually abused me for many years, robbing me of my innocence and mental health,” said accuser Courtney Wild. “Jeffrey Epstein robbed myself and all the other victims of our day in court to confront him one by one, and for that, he is a coward … I feel very angry and sad. Justice has never been served in this case.” About 20 women spoke in Manhattan federal court, detailing the emotional turmoil they still experience. Several of the women, including Sarah Ransome, testified, “I’m a victim of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s international sex trafficking ring,” and urged prosecutors: “Please, please, finish what you have started.” In June 2022, Ghislaine Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison. She has appealed. Maxwell also faces a second criminal trial for perjury.

August 27, 2021 – Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland celebrated Women's Equality Day with a video message to mark 101^st anniversary of U.S. women gaining the right to vote with ratification of the 19th Amendment.

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August 28, 1691 – Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel born, Holy Roman Empress by marriage to Emperor Charles VI. She was raised as a Lutheran, but was forced to convert to Catholicism when she married, and prior to the wedding had to undergo a medical examination to prove her fertility, and was tested by the Emperor’s Jesuit confessor on the catechism of the Roman Catholic Church. In 1708, after they were wed in Barcelona while Charles was fighting for his claim to the Spanish throne, she was continuously pressured to produce a son. When Charles left Spain in 1711 to succeed his brother as Holy Roman Emperor, he left Elisabeth Christine behind as General Governor of Catalonia in his absence. She ruled alone from 1711 to 1713, when Charles’ French rival for the Spanish throne became Philip V of Spain. Elisabeth Christine left for Vienna, where Charles tried to keep completely away from any political influence, but she forged alliances with some of the ministers, and had some influence on a treaty with the Russian Tsar because of her family connections in Northern Germany. She also allied herself with the court faction opposing marrying her daughters into the Spanish royal house. She gave birth to the demanded male child in 1716, but the baby died just a few months later. Three years after her marriage, court doctors prescribed large doses of liquor to make her more fertile. During her 1725 pregnancy, Charles unsuccessfully had her bedchamber decorated with erotic images of male beauty so as to make her expected baby male by stimulating her fantasy. After this, the court doctors prescribed a rich diet to increase her fertility, which made her so fat that she became unable to walk, experienced breathing problems, insomnia and dropsy and had to be lowered into her chairs by a specially constructed machine. Her health was devastated. She gave birth to three daughters, but one died in infancy. In 1740 Charles died, but she never received the large income he had left her in his will. Her daughter Maria Theresa, who became Holy Roman Empress, assured that her mother was able to live comfortably, but maintained a formal relationship with her mother, strictly adhering to Spanish court etiquette. Elizabeth Christine died in Vienna at age 59 in 1740.

August 28, 1774 – Elizabeth Ann Seton born, first person born in the U.S. to be canonized by the Roman Catholic Church, in 1975. She founded the first American Catholic girls’ school, in Maryland, and also founded the Sisters of Charity, first American congregation of religious sisters. Seton Hall University was named in her honor by her nephew, Bishop James Bayley.

August 28, 1834 – Clara Erskine Clement born, traveler and author; noted for History of Egypt, and Women Artists in Europe and America.

August 28, 1859 – Lida (Matilda) Scott Howell born, American archer who won three gold medals at the 1904 Summer Olympics in St. Louis, Missouri, the first time women competed in archery in the modern Olympics. She also won 17 U.S. national championship titles. She retired from national competition in 1907. Archery was discontinued from the Olympics after 1920, due to lack of standardized international rules, and wasn’t reinstated until 1972.

August 28, 1887 – Jessie Woodrow Wilson Sayre born, daughter of Woodrow Wilson and Ellen Axson Wilson; Democratic political activist who campaigned for women’s suffrage and the League of Nations, and was active with the League of Women Voters and the YWCA. In 1928, she became secretary of the Massachusetts Democratic State Committee. She died at age 45 in 1933 after undergoing abdominal surgery. Her daughter Eleanor Sayre became an art historian, and was the first woman to be a departmental curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her son Francis Bowes Sayre Jr. became Dean of the Washington National Cathedral. He denounced Senator Joseph McCarthy, and joined Dr. Martin Luther King on the Selma-to-Montgomery march.

August 28, 1888 – Evadne Price born in Australia, Australian-British astrologer and prolific writer under the pen name Helen Zenna Smith. She wrote many romance novels, but is best known for her WWI novel Not So Quiet (a play on Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front), depicting the experiences of British women ambulance drivers, and her Jane Turpin short stories in 1930s magazines, which were published in a series of books in the 1940s, including Jane at War. During WWII, she was a war correspondent for The People, covering the Allied invasion of Europe and many major war stories, including the Nuremberg Trials. She was the first woman journalist to enter the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. For 25 years, she wrote a monthly astrology column in SHE magazine, and was the presenter on an afternoon programme during the early years of BBC television called Fun With the Stars. She co-wrote scripts in the 1960s with her husband Ken Attiwill for the British TV soap-opera Crossroads. She died in 1985 at the age of 96, leaving an unfinished autobiography she had titled Mother Painted Nude.

August 28, 1915 – Tasha Tudor born, notable illustrator and author of children’s books; won Caldecott Honors for Mother Goose; author of a series starting with Corgiville Fair.

The Old Woman Who Lives in a Shoe — by Tasha Tudor

August 28, 1917 – During WWI, The ‘Silent Sentinels’ (woman suffrage activists) outside the White House started carrying banners addressed to “Kaiser Wilson.” Ten of them, including Alice Paul, were arrested, and sentenced to work camps. They went on hunger strikes, which were ended by forced feeding. Between June and November of 1971, 218 protestors were arrested, charged with "obstructing sidewalk traffic" outside the White House gates. The jailing, hunger strikes, and forced feedings were well-covered in the newspapers and pressure grew, until President Wilson announced in January, 1918, that the suffrage amendment was urgently needed as a “war measure.” The House voted to pass it, and the women stopped the picketing. But when the amendment failed to pass in the Senate – by two votes – on September 30, 1918, they returned to picketing through the winter, becoming more confrontational, chaining themselves to fences, and burning copies of Wilson’s words in “watch fires” on the sidewalk in front of the White House.

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August 28, 1921 – Lidia Gueiler Tejeda born, Bolivian politician; Acting President of Bolivia (1979-1980), becoming Bolivia’s first woman Head of State; President of the Bolivian Chamber of Deputies (1979); Member of the Congress of Bolivia (1956-1964).

August 28, 1924 – Janet Frame born, pseudonym of Nene Janet Paterson Clutha, New Zealand author, also known for her personal history; her book The Lagoon and Other Stories, published in 1951, won the prestigious Hubert Church Memorial Award just days before she was scheduled to have a lobotomy, which was cancelled when the award was announced. She had some difficulty in school during two years of theoretical studies in psychology, and during a year of practical placement, she became despondent and attempted suicide, and was briefly admitted to a psychiatric ward for observation. She was unwilling to return home, where there were frequent outbursts of anger and violence between her father and her brother, so she was transferred to Seacliff Lunatic Asylum, and then spent the next eight years in and out of psychiatric hospitals. Her initial diagnosis of schizophrenia was treated with electroconvulsive therapy and insulin. In spite of this, she wrote her short story collection during this time, and it saved her from being lobotomized. Four years later, she was discharged from Seacliff, and wrote her first full-length novel, Owls Do Cry, published in 1957, then went to Europe, and later traveled in the U.S., but still struggled with anxiety and depression. Her three volumes of autobiography, To the Island, An Angel at My Table and The Envoy from Mirror City, were her best-selling books. She died in 2004, at age 79, from acute myeloid leukaemia.

August 28, 1931 – Cristina Deutekom born, Dutch coloratura soprano, notable for her performances as Queen of the Night in Mozart’s The Magic Flute. She retired from the stage in 1986, after suffering heart problems, and turned to giving master classes. She had a stroke in 2004, and retired. She died at age 82 in 2014, just before her birthday.

August 28, 1942 – Wendy E. Davies born, Welsh historian and academic; Emeritus Professor of History at University College, London; noted for her studies of Welsh and Briton history, and for her analysis of the Llandaff Charters; founding Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales; and co-director of the interdisciplinary Celtic Inscribed Stones Project.

August 28, 1948 – Vonda N. McIntyre born, American science fiction author and founder of the Clarion West Writers Workshop in Seattle, Washington, with support from Robin Scott Wilson, founder of the original Clarion Writers Workshop in Pennsylvania. Her first novel, The Exile Waiting, was published in 1975. She was co-editor with Susan Janice Anderson of Aurora: Beyond Equality, a feminist-humanist science fiction anthology, in 1976. She wrote a number of Star Trek and Star Wars novels. In 1979, her novel Dreamsnake won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novel. The Moon and the Sun, set in the court of Louis XIV, was published in 1997. Her last book, Curve of the World, was completed just before her death in 2019.

August 28, 1948 – Heather Reisman born, Canadian founder and CEO of Indigo Books and Music, and the founder of Indigo Love of Reading Foundation, which donates millions of books to libraries in under-resourced public elementary schools. She has donated to many charities and scholarship programs. In 2010, she started an online petition during the international campaign to save Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, an Iranian Azeri woman convicted of adultery and complicity in the murder of her husband, and sentenced to death by stoning. Ashtiani remained on death row for nine years before her sentence was commuted; she was freed in 2014.

August 28, 1948 – Elizabeth Wilmshurst born, British jurist, legal adviser and academic; Distinguished Fellow of the International Law Programme at Chatham House (Royal Institute of International Affairs), and Professor of International Law at University College London. She was the leading British negotiator of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, both within the framework of the UN Preparatory Committee for the Establishment of an ICC (1996-1998) and the Rome Diplomatic Conference (1998). Wilmshurst was Deputy Legal Adviser at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office of the United Kingdom in 2003, but resigned three days after Lord Goldsmith’s final advice to the British government reversed her legal opinion that the invasion of Iraq would be illegal without a second UN Security Council Resolution to SCR 678, adopted in November, 1990, noting that Iraq continued to defy the Security Council’s demand that Iraq withdraw from Kuwait by January 15, 1991, and empowering states to use “all necessary means” to force Iraq out if it was still in Kuwait after the deadline. In 2010, Wilmshurst gave evidence to the British Iraq Inquiry about the legality of the 2003 Iraq invasion and the advice given to former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw on the same day as her former boss, Sir Michael Wood. She is noted for the widely used book, An Introduction to International Criminal Law and Procedure, which she co-edited with Robert Cryer, Hakan Friman and Darryl Robinson.

August 28, 1952 – Rita Dove born, African American poet, essayist and academic; she was the youngest appointee as U.S. Poet Laureate (1993-1995) and was a Special Consultant in Poetry (1999-2000) for the celebrations of the Bicentennial Year of the Library of Congress. Dove is also the second African American to receive the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, for Thomas and Beulah, and served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia (2004-2006). Noted for On the Bus with Rosa Parks, Mother Love, and Collected Poems: 1974-2004, which was a finalist for a 2016 National Book Award.

August 28, 1954 – Katharine Abraham born, American feminist economist; Director of the Maryland Center for Economics and Policy, and a professor of Survey Methodology and Economics at the University of Maryland. She was Commissioner of Labor Statistics at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (1993-2001) and a member of the Council of Economic Advisers (2011-2013); honored with the 2002 Julius Shiskin Award for Economic Statistics and the 2010 Roger Herriot Award for Innovation in Federal Statistics; testified repeatedly in the 1990s before Congress about the need to revise the Consumer Price Index.

August 28, 1966 – Priya Dutt Roncon born, Indian social worker and Indian National Congress party politician; Member of the Indian Parliament for Mumbai North Central (2009-2014) and for Mumbai North West (2005-2009). During and after the Bombay riots in Mumbai in December 1992 and January 1993, she worked with Muslim refugees in spite of threatening phone calls and harassment in public.

August 28, 1981 – Kezia Dugdale born, Scottish Labour Party politician; Leader of the Scottish Labour Party (2015-2017); Scottish Labour Spokesperson for Finance and the Constitution (2016-2017); Deputy Leader of the Scottish Labour Party (2014-2015); Scottish Labour Spokesperson for Education and Lifelong Learning (2013-2014); Member of the Scottish Parliament for Lothian (2011-2019).

August 28, 1989 – Cécile McLorin Salvant born, American jazz vocalist. She won first prize in the 2010 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition, and her third album, For One to Love, won the 2016 Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Album. She won a second Grammy in 2018 for Dreams and Daggers, and a third Grammy in 2019 for The Window.

August 28, 2017 – Helen Steel was an environmental campaigner who was deceived into forming a long-term intimate relationship with a police spy. She refused to pay Scotland Yard a £7,000 legal bill incurred during the four-year legal challenge she launched to compel the Metropolitan police to disclose that her former boyfriend, John Dines, had been an undercover officer. Her battle against the police chiefs eventually compelled them to apologise unreservedly for the abuse and emotional trauma which she and other women suffered from the deception by police spies. John Dines was part of an undercover unit that infiltrated hundreds of political groups for over 40 years. In the 1980s, he adopted a fake identity and spent five years pretending to be a leftwing campaigner. During his covert mission he started a two-year relationship with Steel, an environmental and social justice campaigner, but concealed from her his true identity. In 1992, Dines disappeared, claiming to be having a mental breakdown. Steel was worried he could kill himself. In reality he had returned to the police to resume his duties. Steel spent years trying to discover who he really was, and in 2011, she joined seven other women deceived by undercover officers in suing the police. In 2014, a high court judge ruled that police had to disclose the identities of two spies, but not those of Dines and another former undercover officer. Steel started an appeal, but in 2015, she was warmed that if she lost, she would likely have to pay the huge legal costs of the police, so she withdrew her appeal. This made her liable for the Met’s costs up that point. Steele says she was forced to withdraw to avoid the possibility of being landed with an even larger bill. She said, “If the Met had been prepared to tell the truth in the first place, this appeal would never have been necessary. I don’t see why I should have to pay their costs for the cover-up. Despite their public apology to myself and other women who were abused by undercover policemen, the Met has done their utmost to protect the abusers rather than protecting the public. It is outrageous that in order to get the police to admit the truth, women who have been abused by police officers are forced to go through lengthy legal battles where they risk bankruptcy or losing their home.” Green Party peer Jenny Jones wrote to Cressida Dick, the Metropolitan police commissioner, urging her to drop their attempt to recover the legal costs from Steel and “accept that it is part of the financial cost of poor and sometimes illegal policing tactics.” Lady Jones added, “While I understand the legal imperative to recover such costs, I also see that there are times when common sense should rule.”

August 28, 2019 – Greta Thunberg arrived in New York after crossing the Atlantic under sail. She came to attend a UN Summit on zeros emissions. Crowds waited for hours to welcome her arrive on the yacht, designed to achieve zero-carbon status: propelled by wind, and using solar panels and water-driven generators for electricity. At a press conference, Thunberg urged people to come together to tackle the climate crisis. “We need to stand together and take action because otherwise it might be too late.” To cheers from the crowd, she said: “Let’s not wait any longer. Let’s do it now.” She added: “It is insane that a 16-year-old would have to cross the Atlantic to take a stand … [against] the climate and ecological crisis is a global crisis and the biggest humanity has ever faced.”She also took a swipe at the US president, Donald Trump, a longstanding denier of the climate crisis. When asked if she had a message for Trump, she said: “I say, ‘Listen to the science’. And he obviously does not do that. If no one has been able to convince him about the climate crisis and the urgency, why would I be able to?” Thunberg sailed from the British port of Plymouth on August 14, and the teenager marked the first anniversary of the start of her school strike on August 20, which launched the international “Fridays for Future” movement.

August 28, 2020 – For decades in Turkey, there was no higher honour than being made fun of by Huysuz Virjin (Grumpy Virgin), the country’s first drag queen, beloved for her glamorous outfits and outrageous sense of humour. Turgut Özal, Turkish president from 1989 to 1993, appeared on her Istanbul show during his term of office. Huysuz Virjin died in July 2020, and her death was widely mourned, even as the administration of Recep Erdoğan has been considering scrapping legislation on gender-based violence, claiming it protects and legitimizes sexual minorities. Top officials, including Erdoğan, have been making public remarks suggesting gay people are perverts or pedophiles and that they spread disease. Netflix cancelled a new Turkish series, instead of giving in to pressure from regulators to remove a gay character. Homosexuality has been legal since modern Turkey was founded in 1923, but that hasn’t stopped hate crimes against LGBTQ+ people in this Muslin-majority country. “Historically under the Ottomans, Turkey was permissive when it came to sexuality. It was never coded into law, which helps explain why artists like Huysuz Virjin had television shows that were so popular across every demographic. It’s a very grey area that relies on cultural tolerance,” said the Turkish writer Kaya Genc, author of The Lion and the Nightingale: A Journey Through Modern Turkey. “Now, the conversation has changed. Erdoğan’s greatest strength as a politician was always his opportunism and flexibility, but now he’s boxed himself in on certain positions. It’s a losing battle.” Drag artist Deniz Aşırı said, “I feel like I was just living my life, and society’s attitudes started becoming more hostile. Now just existing as a queer or trans person is inherently political in a country like this.”

August 28, 2021 – Sue Dobson, a white South African, risked arrest, torture, and imprisonment while spying for the black nationalist African National Congress (ANC) during the latter days of the brutal apartheid regime. She was a middle-class woman in her 20s when the joined the ANC and infiltrated the white minority government – even having a honey-pot affair with a police official to obtain information. When her cover was blown in 1989, she fled to Britain, where she sought political asylum after threats to her life. Decades later, she has written a memoir. The film rights have been sold even before the book’s publication. She said in an interview, “It’s because I’m ordinary that I was able to do the work that I did because I wasn’t suspected … My ordinariness has been my strength, strangely.”

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August 29, 1728 – Maria Ana Sophia of Saxony born; as the wife of Maximillian III Joseph, she became Electress of Bavaria, and negotiated with Frederick II of Prussia to ensure Bavaria’s independence from Austria.

August 29, 1815 – Anna Ella Carroll born, American reformer, anti-slavery pamphleteer, and lobbyist. After freeing her own slaves in 1860, she used the pen-name ‘Hancock,’ and published articles in the National Intelligencer. Carroll defended Lincoln early in the Civil War in her pamphlet, The War Powers of the General Government, against claims that by suspending writ of habeas corpus, imposing martial law, and instituting a naval blockade he had violated the Constitution. She went to St. Louis in the fall of 1861, to gather intelligence from riverboat captains that probably influenced changing the Union’s main invasion routes from the Mississippi River to the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers.

August 29, 1824 – Eliza Allen Starr born, American artist, art critic, and educator; noted for books on Catholic art.

August 29, 1880 – Elisabeth Irwin born, American educator, psychologist, and reformer, founder of the Little Red School House, a progressive school in New York City.

August 29, 1913 – Sylvia Fine born, American lyricist and composer; she wrote over 100 songs for her husband, Danny Kaye, and managed his career; she was also a television producer, and teacher. She died of emphysema at age 78 in New York.

August 29, 1915 – Ingrid Bergman born, Swedish actress, American film star; she won three Academy Awards, two Emmy Awards, four Golden Globes and a Tony Award. Her career survived the scandal caused by her extramarital affair with Italian director Roberto Rossellini, divorce from her husband, and marriage to Rossellini, which made her “box office poison” in the U.S. from 1950 until 1956, when she returned to Hollywood for the hit film Anastasia, for which she won her second Best Actress Oscar.

August 29, 1924 – Dinah Washington born, American jazz and blues singer and pianist.

August 29, 1926 – Helene Glykatzi-Ahrweiler born in Greece, historian, first woman Principal of the Université de Paris Panthéon-Sorbonne in its 700 year history; UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador; member of the British Academy and the Academy of Athens.

August 29, 1931 – Lise Payette born, French Canadian feminist, Parti Québécois politician, radio show editor and host, and columnist for the Journal de Montreal (2004-2007) and Le Devoir (2007-2016); Member of the National Assembly of Quebec (1976-1981), she served during that time as Minister for Consumer Affairs, Minister of State for the Status of Women, and Minister of State for Social Development; she was responsible for the updating of the Civil Code of Quebec to allow two surnames for children; honored with the 1997 Florence Bird Award by the International Centre for Human Rights and Development, and made an Officer of the National Order of Quebec in 2001.

August 29, 1933 – Jehan Sadat born, teacher, human rights activist, married to Anwar Sadat, and was Egypt’s First Lady (1970-1981). She strongly influenced the reform of Egypt’s civil rights laws. The laws giving rights to Egyptian women are often called the “Jehan Laws.” She headed an Egyptian delegation to a UN International Women’s Conference. Her autobiography, A Woman of Egypt, was published in the U.S. in 1987. She died at age 87 in July 2021, and was honored with a state funeral in Cairo.

August 29, 1938 – Angela Huth born, English journalist, novelist, playwright, and BBC presenter; she has published 3 collections of short stories and 11 novels, noted for her best-selling novel Land Girls, about the British women who did farm work during WWII taking the place of men who were soldiers; Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature since 1978.

August 29, 1946 – Francine D. Blau born, American economist and Frances Perkins Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations, and professor of economics at Cornell University; first woman honored with the IZA Prize in Labor Economics, in 2010, for her “seminal contributions to the economic analysis of labor market inequality.” Also recipient of the 2001 Carolyn Shaw Bell Award from the American Economic Association Committee of the Status of Women in the Economic Profession, and the 2017 Jacob Mincer Award by the Society of Labor Economists for lifetime contributions to the field. Her books include Equal Pay in the Office, Gender and Family Issues in the Workplace, and The Economics of Women, Men and Work.

August 29, 1947 – Temple Grandin born, American professor of animal science at Colorado State University, and consultant to the livestock industry on animal behavior. Grandin is a prominent and widely cited proponent for the humane treatment of livestock for slaughter. She is also a spokesperson for autism, one of the first individuals on the autism spectrum to publicly share insights from her personal experience, inventor of a ‘hug box’ device which has a calming effect, and author of Emergence: Labeled Autistic, and Thinking in Pictures. She was originally diagnosed at the age of two as having ‘brain damage,’ which wasn’t confirmed until she was 64 years old, by cerebral imaging. Her mother was the first to hypothesize that she was autistic when Grandin was in her teens, but a formal diagnosis was not made until she was in her 40s. She has also been identified as an autistic savant.

August 29, 1952 – Karen Hesse born, American children’s and YA author and poet; awarded the 1998 Newberry Medal for her depression-era book Out of the Dust, and the 2012 Phoenix Award from the Children’s Literature Association for Letters from Rivka, about a Jewish girl and her family who left Russia in 1919.

August 29, 1969 – Jennifer Crittenden born, American screenwriter and producer; noted for episodes for The Simpsons, Everybody Loves Raymond and Seinfield. She was also an executive producer on Everybody Loves Raymond, and a producer on Seinfeld.

August 29, 1974 – Kumi Tanioka born, Japanese composer and pianist, best known for her compositions for video games (1998-2010), including the Square Enix game Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles.

August 29, 1982 – Ruhila Adatia-Sood born, Kenyan television and radio presenter and journalist of Indian heritage. On September 21, 2013, she was mortally wounded in the Westgate shopping mall shooting while hosting a cooking competition for children in the centre's rooftop car park, and died on the way to the Aga Khan Hospital, one of the 71 people killed in the attack and subsequent fire. At the time of her death, at the age of 31, she was six or seven months pregnant with her first child, after being married in January 2012.

August 29, 2015 – California lawmakers pass Assembly Bill 2888 to close a legal loophole that let a judge sentence sexual predator Brock Turner to just six months in jail and three years’ probation, after assaulting “Emily Doe,” an unconscious woman behind a trash dumpster. When two students discovered him in the act, he tried to flee, but they tackled him, and pinned him down until police arrived. Prosecutors asked for a sentence of six years, because there was no penile penetration. But Turner would only serve three months behind bars, as the judge was more concerned with “ruining a young man’s future” than justice for the victim. California Governor Jerry Brown signed the bill into law, which imposes mandatory prison sentences for people convicted of raping or sexually assaulting someone who was unconscious, intoxicated, or otherwise incapable of giving consent. Previously, the state only required prison time for rape or sexual assault by force.

August 29, 2019 – A new study published in the Lancet looked at long-term data from over 100,000 women who developed breast cancer after menopause. Half of the women used menopausal hormone therapy (MHT, aka HRT), and the study found that the longer they took the MHT, the more likely they were to develop breast cancer. “This is a consensus of many researchers and many studies all around the world. These are important new results,” said Valerie Beral, a cancer epidemiologist at the University of Oxford and one of the lead authors of the new study. Women have long been prescribed synthetic versions to replace the hormones that decline during menopause. The medications — usually delivered in a pill, but sometimes in a patch, gel, or injection — provide women either estrogen or a combination of estrogen and progesterone. For many women, they help to decrease symptoms of menopause, including osteoporosis. There have been indications that MHT increased the risk of breast cancer since the early 200os, but this was the first study to look at factors like a woman’s age when she started using MHT, or the length of time she took MHT. Researchers found that, compared to women who never used MHT, women who did had a significantly higher risk of developing invasive breast cancer. They estimated that 6.3% of women who never used MHT developed breast cancer, compared to 8.3% of women who used the combination drug continually for five years. That’s roughly one extra cancer diagnosis for every 50 users. The longer women used MHT, the greater their risk of breast cancer. Women who were no longer using MHT had a lower relative risk than women who were currently using it — but they still remained at a higher risk for over a decade after they stopped taking the drug. The study also found that women who took the combination drug were more likely to develop cancer than women who took the estrogen-only drug.

August 29, 2020 – In Zambia’s Eastern Province, the leader of the 100,000 Chewa people is chieftain Kawaza, “As a female traditional leader, my aim is to be a role model within my chiefdom. I want to ensure that we collectively challenge social and traditional norms and practices that negatively affect our women and girls ... Many girls are forced to drop out of school in order to undergo initiation rites.” The rites often include inaccurate information about sexual and reproductive health, and in some cases, young people are encouraged to have unprotected sex, resulting in sexually transmitted infections, including HIV, and unintended pregnancies. Kawaza has “instructed the traditional counselors who conduct the initiation rites to revise the curriculum to focus only on progressive topics and cultural practices that promote respect for human rights” and she also “issued a directive for all traditional ceremonies to take place only during school holidays.” She is working with experts from the UN Women’s health agency UNFPA, who say the key to change is empowering community members to deliberate on how their practices relate to their own deeply held values. And this leads to transformation. The steps are outlined in a new UNFPA publication: identification of a harmful norm, advocacy by prominent individuals, the exchange of experiences and perspectives within the community, and finally calls for change – can arise organically or be applied deliberately. Then this needs to be followed by discussion, value deliberation and education. It can take place in girls’ schools, among parents’ groups, through television and radio, or in open spaces,” said Nafissatou Diop, UNFPA’s chief of gender and human rights, who spearheaded the new publication. “Diverse forces and ideas and positions need to be confronted and need to come together in that discussion.” Lacina Zerbo, who works for UNFPA in Burkina Faso, said, “One of the successful interventions has been the public declarations of the abandonment of female genital mutilation. More than four million people have publicly abandoned FGM.” Supported by the UNFPA-UNICEF Joint Programme on the Elimination of FGM, similar efforts have reached more than 34 million people in 16 countries and have led to a raft of new laws and policies. The process, Mr. Zerbo said, depends on “creating trust between community members and influencers or decision-makers.”

**Chief Kawaza with students, and Nafissatou Diop of** UNFPA

August 29, 2021 – OnlyFans, a UK “subscription social network” had announced it was going to ban sexually explicit content, mostly produced by sex workers, beginning in October, which has been the site’s biggest draw. Its slick interface, loose content policy, and easy user experience had made it the preferred platform for homegrown pornography. Anyone could post pictures or videos, charge for views, and if they got fans, make a living. But OnlyFans has always marketed itself publicly as a way for any creator to sell subscription content, heavily promoting its cooking and fitness users while downplaying it core porn content. After the announcement, sex workers began sharing advice about other platforms that would still work with them. They also expressed fears that the decision could serve to drive their business back underground – or back on to the street – after losing one of the few sites where individuals could earn real money from adult content. This is a big concern in the era of Covid-19. They worried the company was seeking to do what so many others had: build a business on the back of adult content then abandon it when mainstream success came calling. The company blamed the decision on banks refusing to work with the platform. Then OnlyFans announced it has struck a deal that would allow normal service to resume. “Considering that they’ve said ‘suspended’ the ban – not that they aren’t going through with it - I think they’re going to go through with the ban in a few weeks’ time,” said Lola Hunt, a Melbourne-based sex worker. “The community is very on edge at the moment. Every time a site goes down, our client base is fractured. It’s like running a bricks-and-mortar shop and being chased out of town by religious zealots every six months.”

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August 30, 1787 – Mary Harris Thomas born, poet, diarist, and pioneering South Australian settler. The Diary and Letters of Mary Thomas (1836-1866), first published in 1915, are a detailed account of early colonial life.

August 30, 1797 – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley born, English novelist, best known for her novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus. In her historical novels, she wrote women characters bearing little resemblance to the female characters written by her male contempories. In Valperga, the despot Castruccio Castracani forces the fictional Countess Euthanasia to choose between his love and political liberty, and she chooses liberty. In The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, Lady Katherine Gordon and Monina de Faro are strong women who make their own choices, which differ from those made by the men around them.

August 30, 1821 – Anita Garibaldi born, Brazilian comrade-in-arms and wife of Italian nationalist Giuseppe Garibaldi. A skilled horsewoman, while pregnant, she escapes after being captured by enemies during the Battle of Curitibanos by stealing a horse; when it is shot out from under her, she wades into the river Canoas. Her pursuers assume she will drown, and leave her for dead. She survives for four days without food or water before she finds help, and reunites with Garibaldi; a few months later she gives birth to their son.

August 30, 1833 – The British Factory Act was passed, restricting work for women and 13-to-18-year-olds to 12 hour per day, and 8 hours for children age 9 through 12. In 1847, the limit for women and teenagers was lowered to 10 hours per day.

August 30, 1844 – Emily Ruete born as Salama bint Said, Princess of Zanzibar and Oman, the youngest of 36 children, and author of Memoirs of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar. She was fluent in Arabic and Swahili. She was taught to ride and shoot at the age of seven, and her mother, a Circassian concubine, secretly taught her to write. When her father died in 1856, she was 12 years old, and declared of age. She received a substantial monetary inheritance and a plantation with a residence. In 1859, her mother died and she received her maternal inheritance of three plantations. That same year, a dispute broke out between her brothers Majid and Barghash, who was now Sultan. Though inclined to support Majid, she was talked into supporting Barghash, and became secretary for his party because she could write. An English gunboat soon ended the dispute, but it was Barghash who was sent into exile for two years, and she spent the time keeping a low profile at one of her estates. Returned to the capital, she made up with Majid, for which Barghash and her favorite sister were unforgiving. She fell in love with a German merchant, Rudolph Heinrich Ruete, and became pregnant. In 1866, they fled aboard a British frigate to Aden, where she took Christian instruction and was baptized prior to their marriage, but she avoided eating pork, and dreaded attending church. The child she gave birth to died when he was only a few months old, on the journey to Germany in 1867. They settled in Hamburg, and had three more children, but her husband was killed in a tram accident in 1870, leaving the family in difficult economic circumstances because authorities had denied her inheritance claims. She wrote her book to help raise money to live on. It was the first known autobiography of an Arab woman, and was published in Germany in 1886, and later in translation in the United States and Great Britain. There were rumors that Otto von Bismarck wanted to install her son as Sultan of Zanzibar, under German control. She traveled, revisiting Zanzibar, and spent time in Beirut, Lebanon, Jaffa, then returned to Germany, where she died in 1924, at age 79, from pneumonia. In 1992, her letters were published as An Arabian Princess Between Two Worlds.

August 30, 1906 – Elizabeth Pakenham, Countess of Longford, better known as Elizabeth Longford, British historian and biographer; her book Victoria R.I. won the 1964 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography.

August 30, 1906 – Olga Taussky-Todd born in Austria-Hungary in what is now the Czech Republic, mathematician famous for over 300 research papers in algebraic number theory, integral matrices, and matrices in algebra and analysis. Both her sisters had careers in science, Iona as a consulting chemist, and Hertha as a pharmacist, and later a clinical chemist. Olga Taussky studied mathematics at the University of Vienna, and earned her doctorate there. She attended meetings of the Vienna Circle of Logical Empiricism, a highly influential group of philosophers and scientists. She became well-known for her work on matrix theory, and was hired to find and correct the mathematical errors in the works of David Hilbert, so they could be collected into a volume to be presented to him on his birthday. Taussky was unable to repair only his paper on the continuum hypothesis. In 1935, she moved to England, and became a Fellow at Girton College, Cambridge. During WWII, she used matrices to analyze vibrations in airplanes at the National Physical Laboratory, and wrote several articles on the subject which were published by the Ministry of Aircraft Production. She married Irish mathematician Jack Todd in 1938. In 1945, the couple emigrated to the U.S. and worked for the National Bureau of Standards. In 1957 she and her husband both joined the faculty of California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California. She also supervised Caltech's first female Ph.D. in Math, Lorraine Foster. Taussky retired from teaching in 1977, but continued her correspondence with other mathematicians regarding her work in matrix theory. She was a Fellow of the AAAS, a Noether Lecturer and a recipient of the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art, 1st class (1978). In 1993, the International Linear Algebra Society established a lecture series to honor the contributions to the field of linear algebra made by Taussky-Todd and her husband.

August 30, 1907 – Luisa Moreno born as Blanca Rosa López Rodríguez to a wealthy family in Guatemala, who became a labor organizer, political activist, and writer. While still a teenager, she organized La Sociedad Gabriela Mistral, which successfully lobbied for the admission of women to Guatemalan universities. Rejecting her elite status, she went to Mexico City to pursue a career in journalism. In 1927 at age 20, she married artist Angel De León, and they moved to New York City the following year. During a protest of the 1930 anti-Mexican movie, Under a Texas Moon, the police brutalized the protesters, and killed their leader, Gonzalo González. The murder sparked even larger protests, in which Moreno took part, and motivated her to work to unify the Spanish-speaking communities in the U.S. When the Great Depression struck in 1929, she went to work as a seamstress in Spanish Harlem, where she organized her co-workers into a garment workers union. In 1935, she was hired by the American Federation of Labor (AFL) as a professional organizer. She left her husband, who had become abusive, and moved to Florida with her daughter, where she unionized African-American and Latin American cigar-rollers, joined the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and represented the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), as well as editing its Spanish-language newspaper in 1940. Moreno helped organize workers at pecan-shelling plants in Texas, and cannery workers in Los Angeles. She empowered other workers, especially women, to take leadership roles in their union organizations. She was a main organizer of the El Congreso de Pueblos de Hablan Española (Spanish-speaking People's Congress). She took a year off from UCAPAWA to travel throughout the U.S., visiting Latino workers on the East Coast, in the Southwest, and allying refugees of the Spanish Civil War to her cause. In 1940, she spoke before the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born (ACPFB). Her speech, which became known as the "Caravan of Sorrow" speech, eloquently described the lives of migrant Mexican workers. Portions of it were reprinted in Committee pamphlets, creating a legacy that lasted much longer than the speech itself. “These people are not aliens. They have contributed their endurance, sacrifices, youth and labor to the Southwest. Indirectly, they have paid more taxes than all the stockholders of California's industrialized agriculture, the sugar companies and the large cotton interests, that operate or have operated with the labor of Mexican workers.” She organized cannery workers in San Diego, and co-founded an employment office there. During WWII, when the defense industry refused to hire Mexicans for the higher paying jobs, she criticized their discrimination. In 1947, she married Gray Bemis, a navy veteran from Nebraska who had been a delegate to the 1932 Socialist Party of America national convention. Bemis shared Moreno's interest in the civil rights of Mexican Americans, and photographed many of her activities. In the late 1940s, Moreno established a San Diego chapter of the Mexican Civil Rights Committee. During the 1950s, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) conducted Operation Wetback to forcibly deport Mexicans and Mexican Americans. The operation targeted labor leaders in particular. While she was considered polite and law abiding, her activism earned her enemies. She and her husband began receiving threatening letters for their work against police brutality. She was labeled by reactionary California Senator John Tunney as a "dangerous alien," but was offered citizenship in exchange for testifying against Harry Bridges, a Longshore and Warehouse Union leader, but she refused to be "a free woman with a mortgaged soul." She was deported in November, 1950, on the grounds that she had once been a member of the Communist Party. Her husband went with her, first to Mexico City, and then to Guatemala, but they were forced to flee during the 1954 CIA-sponsored overthrow of progressive President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. After the 1959 Cuban Revolution, she taught school in Cuba. She later returned to Guatemala, where she died in 1992.

August 30, 1907 – Leonor Fini born, Argentinian surrealist painter, designer, illustrator, and author; noted for her depictions of powerful women. She was raised in Italy by her Italian mother after her parents divorced when she was a year old. Custody battles between her parents led to sudden flights in disguises, and she was a rebellious child. At age 17, she moved to Milan, then to Paris in the early 1930s. She had no formal training in art, but knew the traditional Renaissance and Mannerist styles from her time growing up in Italy. She had her first one-woman show in Milan in 1929, and her first major exhibition in New York in 1936. In 1943, Fini was included in Peggy Guggenheim's show ‘Exhibition by 31 Women’ in New York, and in 1949 Frederick Ashton choreographed a ballet conceptualized by Fini, Le Rêve de Leonor (Leonor's Dream), with music by Benjamin Britten. In the 1970s, she wrote novels, Rogomelec, Moumour, Contes pour enfants velus, and Oneiropompe. She did the graphic illustrations for Histoire d'O (Story of O) published in 1954. 'Father of Surrealism' Andre Breton saw women solely as muses to inspire male genius, but Leonor Fini declared, “I’m not a Muse, I’m an Artist.”

Portrait of Mrs Hasellter (1942) – by Leonor Fini

August 30, 1907 – Bertha Parker Pallan born, the first Native American woman archaeologist, of Abenaki and Seneca descent, daughter of Arthur C. Parker, archaeologist and first president of the Society for American Archaeology; she worked on a dig in Nevada for the Southwest Museum, and later as an archaeologist and ethnologist for the museum.

August 30, 1909 – Virginia Lee Burton born, American children’s author and illustrator; her book The Little House won a Caldecott Award; she founded the textile collective Folly Cove Designers.

August 30, 1912 – Nancy Wake born in New Zealand, she was a journalist in Paris when she met Henri Fiocca, a French industrialist in Marseille, and they married. After the fall of France to Nazi Germany in 1940, she a became a British Special Operations Executive agent and courier, and was a leading figure in the French Resistance; one of the Allies’ most decorated servicewomen of the war, by 1943 she was the Gestapo’s most wanted person with a 5 million franc price on her head.

August 30, 1918 – Fanny Kaplan, who was born Feiga Haimovba Roytblat, shoots and seriously injures Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin in Moscow; she refuses to implicate anyone else, insisting she acted alone, but she was a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, which had been banned. The decree ‘On Red Terror’ was issued September 5, 1918, and over 10,000 Russians were summarily executed before it was revoked.

August 30, 1922 – Regina Resnik born, American mezzo-soprano; her international career spanned 50 years, but the New York Met was her artistic home; considered one of the greatest portrayers of Carmen.

August 30, 1923 – Barbara Ansell born, British physician; founder of pediatric rheumatology, developing a system of classifying childhood arthritis, and specialized in research and treatment of Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis.

August 30, 1923 – Charmian Clift born, Australian writer, essayist, and memoirist; she wrote notable essays for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Herald in Melbourne (1964-1969), which were later collected and published as books; known for her memoirs Mermaid Singing and Peel Me a Lotus, and her novel Honour's Mimic; alcoholism and a disintegrating marriage contributed to her suicide in 1969 at age 44.

August 30, 1935 – Xernona Brewster Clayton born, American civil rights leader and broadcasting executive. She worked for the National Urban League and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the 1960s, then became the first African American from the South to host a daily prime time talk show (1967-1979). She was corporate VP for Urban Affairs for Turner Broadcasting (1988-1997), and founded the Trumpet Foundation, which annually gives Trumpet Awards for accomplishments and contributions by African Americans. Her autobiography, I've Been Marching All The Time, was published in 1991.

August 30, 1935 – Alexandra Bellow born in Romania, Romanian American mathematician who has contributed to the fields of ergodic theory, probability, and analysis. She won the 1987 Humboldt Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

August 30, 1935 – Sylvia Earle born, oceanographer, advocate for educating the public about the importance of oceans as essentials environmental habitats; pioneer in use of SCUBA gear; Earle was the first woman to serve as chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). She was the co-designer and builder with Graham Hawkes of a submersible craft which was the first to reach depths of 3,000 feet. Sylvia Earl is also the author of Atlas of the Ocean: The Deep Frontier.

August 30, 1941 – Sue MacGregor born, BBC Radio 4 broadcaster; presenter of Woman’s Hour (1972-1987), the Today programme (1984-2002), and A Good Read (2003-2010).

August 30, 1944 – Dame Frances Cairncross born, British economist, journalist and academic; Senior Fellow at the School of Public Policy, UCLA; chair of the Executive Committee of the Institute for Fiscal Studies; Rector of Exeter College, Oxford (2004-2014); chair of the Economic and Social Research Council (2001-2007); on the staff of The Economist (1984-2004); economics correspondent (1973-1981) and staff writer (1973-1984) for The Guardian newspaper.

August 30, 1944 – Molly Ivins born, American columnist, political commentator, humorist, and author; she was the first woman police reporter at the Minneapolis Tribune, then joined the Texas Observer in 1970, where she covered the Texas legislature. She worked for the New York Times (1976-1982), which hired her for her colorful writing style, and then tried to get her to tone it down. She returned to Texas to become a columnist for the Dallas Times Herald (1981-1991), and then the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (1992-2001), which was syndicated and carried by hundreds of newspapers. Her 1991 book, Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?, remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 29 weeks.

August 30, 1951 – Dana Rosemary Scallon born, Irish singer and politician, member of the European Parliament (1999-2004) for Connacht-Ulster.

August 30, 1958 – Karen P. Buck born, British Labour Party politician; Member of Parliament for Westminster North since 1997; MP for Regent’s Park/Kensington N. (1997-2010); Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Transport (2006).

August 30, 1958 – Muriel Gray born, Scottish horror novelist, broadcaster on Channel Four’s music show The Tube, and journalist who has written for Time Out, The Sunday Herald, and The Guardian; the first woman Rector of the University of Edinburgh, the first female chair of the Glasgow School of Art board of governors; appointed to the board of trustees of The British Museum since 2015; elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2018; Patron of the Scottish charity Trees for Life, which is working to restore the Caledonian Forest.

August 30,1958 – Anna Politkovskaya born to Ukranian parents, Russian journalist, writer, and human rights activist who reported on Russian political events, especially the Second Chechen War (1999-2005), which made her national and international reputation, refusing to give up reporting in spite of intimidation, arrest by Russian military forces, and being poisoned on a flight from Moscow, which forced her to turn back for medical treatment. Her post-war articles about conditions in Chechnya were re-published in book form, but her work was mainly accessed by Russian readers through Novaya Gazeta, a Russian newspaper known for its often-critical investigative coverage of Russian political and social affairs. She received numerous international awards for her work. In 2004, she published Putin's Russia for readers in the West. She was assassinated in October 2006 in the elevator of her block of flats, which attracted international attention, but the five men arrested and sentenced to prison for the murder never revealed who ordered or paid for the killing.

August 30, 1963 – Sabine Oberhauser born, Austrian physician and politician, Minister for Health (2014-2016). A defender of women’s rights, Oberhauser also served as Minister for Women (2015-2016) until illness forced her to turn over her duties to a colleague. She had been diagnosed with cancer in 2015, and died at age 53 in February 2017.

August 30, 1966 – Joann Fletcher born, English Egyptologist and visiting professor at the University of York; co-founder of the York University Mummy Research Group, and author of a number of books, including The Search for Nefertiti, which covers the work of a multidisciplinary scientific team to identify one of a group of mummies discovered in 1898 as the famous queen, largely dismissed by other Egyptologists as inconclusive.

August 30, 1966 – Constance Baker Motley is confirmed as U.S. district judge, and becomes the first black woman on the federal bench.

August 30, 1973 – Amy Sherald born, American painter, known for her portraits of black Americans in everyday settings, but she also painted portraits for President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama. She is the first African American commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery to paint official presidential portraits. The unveiling of the Obamas’ portraits in 2018 increased attendance at the Washington DC gallery.

Portrait of Michelle Obama — by Amy Sherald

August 30, 1984 – NASA’s space shuttle Discovery lifts off for its first voyage, deploys three communications satellites, with Judith A. Resnik aboard, who becomes the second U.S. woman in space.

August 30, 1985 – Anna Ushenina born, Ukrainian chess grandmaster; Women’s World Chess Champion (2012-2013).

August 30, 2017 – U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel temporarily blocked Texas from enforcing a new anti-abortion law adopted after the Supreme Court struck down tougher abortion restrictions. Judge Yeakel said, "it is in the public interest to preserve the status quo" until the question of the constitutionality of this law is settled, because it could place women undergoing abortion at greater risk if the procedure known as dilation and evacuation, which Yeakel referred to as "the most commonly used and safest pre-viability second trimester abortion procedure" were banned, and the act left a woman and her physician “with abortion procedures that are more complex, risky, expensive, difficult for many women to arrange, and often involve multi-day visits to physicians, and overnight hospital stays."

August 30, 2020 – In France, Anne Soupa, a theologian and biblical scholar, put her name forward to be the next Roman Catholic archbishop of Lyon, in a move that is gathering support around the world even though she stands no chance of succeeding. She asked, “Is there only one model of a bishop, that of a single, elderly man dressed in black?” Soupa, age 73, says there is “an awakening of women within the Catholic church.” Over 17,000 people have signed a petition in support of Soupa’s attempt to succeed Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, who resigned in 2020 after an appeal court overturned his conviction for covering up sexual abuse. Seven other Catholic women in France have followed Soupa’s move in applying for ministries that are open only to men. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that only men can receive holy orders because Jesus chose men as his apostles, and the apostles did the same when they chose collaborators to succeed them in their ministry. Pope John Paul II wrote in 1994 that this teaching is definitive and not open to debate among Catholics. Pope Francis has ruled out any change to the centuries-old rule, and his consideration of the possibility of women deacons has gone nowhere, but he did appoint six women to a body that oversees Vatican finances. In launching her campaign, Soupa said on Twitter: “To exclude half of humanity is not only contrary to the message of Jesus Christ, but is also harmful to the church, which is thus maintained in an environment that is conducive to abuse. Everything entitles me to say that I am capable of running for the title of bishop, everything makes me legitimate. Everything forbids me to do so.”

August 30, 2021 – The Scottish National Party, which holds the majority in the Scottish Parliament, led by First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, is sharing some power with other parties, including for the first time the Scottish Greens Party, which only holds seven seats in parliament. Lorna Slater, co-leader of the Scottish Greens party with Patrick Harvie, was appointed as minister for green skills, circular economy, and biodiversity.

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August 31, 1542 – Isabella Romola de' Medici born, daughter of Cosimo I de' Medici, first Grand Duke of Tuscany; she was educated in a humanist manner with her siblings. They were all tutored in a range of subjects, including classics, languages, and the arts. She had a great love and aptitude for music. Her father arranged her marriage to Paolo Giordano I Orsini, of the powerful Roman Orsini family, when she was 16, but she remained in her father’s household after her marriage, along with her large dowry, because of his concern over his new son-in-law’s extravagant spending. This gave her an unusual degree of independence for a woman of her time. Following her mother’s death in 1562, Isabella acted as first lady of Florence, and displayed the de' Medici aptitude for politics. But she suffered several miscarriages, and didn’t have a surviving child until her daughter Francesca was born when she was 29. She finally produced an heir, her son Virginio, when she was 30. Isabella's free-spirited personality created rumours about the nature of her relationship with Troilo Orsini, Paolo Giordano's cousin, who was charged with looking after her while her husband tended to military duties. Her father meanwhile had cast off his previous mistress, and taken Camilla Martelli as his mistress, who was 26 years his junior. He married her in 1570, at the explicit order of Pope Pius V, probably because of complaints by Camilla’s patrician family. After Cosimo died in 1574, Isabella’s brother Francesco, now Grand Duke, saw to it that Camilla was forced to remain in a convent for the rest of her life. In 1576, Isabella died suddenly under suspicious circumstances, while staying with her husband in an isolated country villa. Her cousin Leonora, after her affair was exposed when her lover’s love letters to her were discovered, had also died unexpectedly, only a few days before (almost certainly strangled by her husband). There was a widespread rumor that Isabella was also murdered, possibly by her husband, or at his instigation, or by order of her brother the Grand Duke. Many believed she died in reprisal for her probable affair with Troilo Orsini, but the murder rumor has never been proved or disproved. She died the month before her 33^rd birthday. After her death, Paolo Giordano returned to Rome, where he started an affair with Vittoria Accoramboni, wife of Francesco Peretti, nephew of the future Pope Sixtus V, whom he almost certainly had assassinated in April 1581. Wanted by both the Papal and Florentine police, Paolo took refuge in northern Italy with his mistress, whom he married in 1585. He died there in November 1585. Vittoria was assassinated in December 1585, by bravos hired by Lodovico Orsini, a relation of Paolo Orsini, after negotiations broke down over division of Paolo’s property. Lodovico and his assassins were put to death for her murder. This saga is an extreme example of the double standard – husbands may stray repeatedly, but wives get the death penalty, or life imprisonment!

August 31, 1775 – Agnes Bulmer born, English poet, author of one the longest epic poems in the English language, Messiah’s Kingdom, which took over nine years to complete.

August 31, 1827 – Anna Bartlett Warner born, American author and hymn writer; her best known work is the children’s song “Jesus Loves Me.”

August 31, 1830 – Harriet Clisby born in England, but grew up in Australia; English physician and women’s rights activist. She was a vegetarian from 1847, the same year in which she became a member of the Swedenborgian New Church. She also practiced gymnastics. She was inspired by Elizabeth Blackwell’s 1852 book on women’s health to study medicine, and took a nursing course at Guy’s Hospital in London. There she met with Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, a prominent woman physician and hospital founder who advised her to train in the U.S. With a friend's financial support, Clisby trained at the New York Medical College and Hospital for Women, graduating in 1865. She moved to Boston in 1871. Clisby practiced homeopathy and lectured on hygiene. Clisby wrote a series of travel articles about Australia for the Woman's Journal, a Boston-based woman suffrage newspaper edited by Lucy Stone and Henry B. Blackwell, in 1873. The "Sketches of Australia" reflected her early life in Australia. She was the founder, with the help of several others, including Louisa May Alcott, of the Women's Educational and Industrial Union in Boston in 1877, to help poor women, especially immigrants, by offering classes in English, millinery, dressmaking, and needlework, as well as free legal advice, a job placement service, and a women’s credit union. After retiring, she moved to Geneva, Switzerland, where she founded L'Union des Femmes, and gave lectures. She died in London at the age of 100, in 1930.

August 31, 1842 – Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin born, publisher, journalist, suffragist, civil rights activist, editor of Women’s Era, first newspaper published by and for African-American women. She was a founder of National Federation of Afro-American Women and the Women’s Era Club, and co-founder of American Woman Suffrage Association.

August 31, 1842 – Mary Putnam Jacobi born, American physician, author, and suffragist; she was a leading spokeswoman for women’s health during the Progressive Era, placing emphasis on scientific research rather than traditional or anecdotal evidence. She was also an advocate for expanding educational opportunities for women, and giving women in medicine the same training and clinical practice as men. Jacobi was awarded Harvard University's Boylston Prize for her 1876 essay, The Question of Rest for Women during Menstruation, in which she used sphygmographic (arterial flow monitor) tracings of pulse rate, force, and variations to confirm that a woman maintained vigorous health throughout her monthly cycle, refuting assumptions that menstruation impaired women’s physical abilities. She was the first woman to be become a member of the Academy of Medicine.

August 31, 1844 – Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward born, American author and feminist; known for challenging traditional religious beliefs and women’s roles. She was advocate for women’s clothing reform and an animal rights activist. The first woman to present a lecture series at Boston University; best known for her trilogy, The Gates Ajar, Between the Gates, and Beyond the Gates. Her later novel, The Story of Avis, depicted the struggle of a woman to balance marriage and her artistic ambitions. She also wrote childrens books that realistically showed the negative impact of poverty and child labor.

August 31, 1870 – Maria Montessori born, Italian physician and educator. Her philosophy of education is still in use today in many classrooms around the world. As a girl, she broke gender barriers and expectations when she enrolled in classes at an all-boys technical school, with hopes of becoming an engineer. She decided instead to become a doctor, and began medical school at the Sapienza University of Rome. She was banned from classes with the male students where the naked body was being studied, and required instead to perform her dissections of cadavers alone, after hours. She graduated – with honors – in 1896, overcoming the difficulties, as well as hostility and harassment from some students and professors. From 1896 to 1901, Montessori worked with and researched so-called "phrenasthenic" children—in modern terms, children experiencing some form of cognitive delay, illness, or disability. She also began to travel, study, speak, and publish nationally and internationally, coming to prominence as an advocate for women's rights and education for mentally disabled children. Montessori published two articles on pedagogy in 1903, and two more the following year. In 1903 and 1904, she conducted anthropological research with Italian schoolchildren, and in 1904 she was qualified as a free lecturer in anthropology for the University of Rome. She was appointed to lecture in the Pedagogic School at the University and continued in the position until 1908. In 1907 Montessori oversaw the first Casa dei Bambini, for the care and education of children of working parents in a new apartment building for low-income families in the San Lorenzo district in Rome, where she observed the children’s behavior, and developed the foundation of her method. Given a free choice of activity, the children showed more interest in practical activities and Montessori's materials than in toys provided for them and were surprisingly unmotivated by sweets and other rewards. Over time, she saw a spontaneous self-discipline emerge. By working independently, children could reach new levels of autonomy and become self-motivated to reach new levels of understanding. Montessori also came to believe that acknowledging all children as individuals and treating them as such would yield better learning and fulfilled potential in each particular child. She held her first teacher training course in her method in 1909, and published her book, Il Metodo della Pedagogia Scientifica Applicato All'Educazione Infantile Nelle Case Dei Bambini (The Method of Scientific Pedagogy Applied to the Education of Children in the Children's Homes). She began to attract international recognition as her book was translated into several other languages between 1911 and 1915, and made extended trips to the U.S. in between 1911 and 1915, then spent time in Spain, the Netherlands, and the UK. Initially, her work was supported by Benito Mussolini’s Fascist government, but from 1930 on, there were conflicts. By 1932, she and her family were under political surveillance. In 1933, she resigned from her position in the Montessori Society, and then left Italy in 1934. The government ended Montessori activities in the country in 1936. In 1938, she was invited to give a training courses in India, then was interned there during WWII as an enemy alien, but was allowed some travel to give lectures and courses. She returned to Europe in 1946, but traveled back and forth from there to India, continuing to give training courses. She represented Italy at the 1950 UNESCO conference in Florence. She died at age 81 of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1952.

August 31, 1877 – Lizzie Arlington born as Elizabeth Stride, American baseball pitcher, the first woman to play baseball for a men’s professional team

August 31, 1879 – Alma Schindler Mahler born in Vienna, pianist, composer, and author; she married successively composer Gustav Mahler (she said he discouraged her composing), architect Walter Gropius, and novelist Franz Werfel. In 1938, she and Werfel fled Austria after it was “annexed” by Germany, making it unsafe for Jews, and settled in Los Angeles. After his death, she moved to New York. Her writings about her life have increasingly become regarded by biographers of her three husbands as unreliable in her portrayals of their affairs and marriages.

August 31, 1906 – Vivienne Byerley born, British press agent for H.M. Tennent Ltd., headed by Binkie Beaumont, which produced over 400 plays, musicals, and reviews between 1936 and 1972, including the London production of My Fair Lady in 1958. Byerley was said to have “whipped London theatregoers into frenzied anticipation” and the black market prices for tickets were five times their face value. The offices of H.M. Tennent Ltd. were in the tower of the Globe Theatre (now the Gielgud Theatre) in London.

TheGlobeTheatreLondon-officesofHMTennentLtd-VivienneByerley.jpg — The Globe Theatre London - offices of H.M. Tennent Ltd

August 31, 1909 – Marie-Louise Grog-Carven born Carmen de Tommaso, French Fashion Designer; founder of the House of Carven. Noted for her designs for petite women, her use of lightweight fabrics such as lace and pink gingham, and for being one of the first couturieres to launch a prêt-à-porter (ready-to-wear) line. Edith Piaf was one of her early celebrity clients. During WWII, when the police came for one of her employees, a Romanian Jew named Henry Bricianer, she hid him in the building where her shop was, and continued to employ him. She and her relatives also hid four members of his family, so all of them survived the war. In 1946, she publicized the launch of her first perfume Ma Griffe (My Signature) by parachuting hundreds of sample bottles across Paris. Carven also designed costumes for several films. She retired at age 84 in 1993, and lived to age 105.

August 31, 1911 – Hilde Jarecki born, German-English educator who came to England before Hitler’s rise to power, and was involved with the Kindertransport operation, which brought nearly 10,000 predominantly Jewish children to foster homes in the UK, beginning in December 1938. The last group of children were rescued from the Netherlands in May 1940, just days before the Nazis overran the country. Often these children would be the only members of their families to survive. After the war, Jarecki worked for as Senior Professional Advisor for the London Playgroup Association, and wrote Playgroups: A Practical Approach, which was published in 1975. She died in 1995.

August 31, 1913 – Helen Levitt born, American photographer, known primarily for street photography in and around New York City.

Harlem NYC in the 1940s — by Helen Levitt

August 31, 1919 – Amrita Pritam born, Indian poet and author, wrote in Punjabi and Hindi, considered one of the leading 20^th century Punjabi-language poets, wrote over 100 books: poetry, fiction, biographies, essays, folk songs, and her autobiography.

August 31, 1936 – Marva Collins born, American educator and lecturer, founder of Westside Preparatory School in Chicago, Illinois, known for successfully providing a classical education to students from poverty and those often wrongly labeled as learning disabled.

August 31, 1944 – Dame Elizabeth “Liz” Forgan born, English journalist and media executive; worked for The Guardian, an editor and columnist (1978-1998); then a non-executive director of the Guardian Media Group (1998-2006); Chair of the Scott Trust in 2003, owner of the Guardian newspapers; Managing Director of BBC Network Radio (1993-1996); Honorary Fellow of the British Academy since 2014; Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire since 2006.

August 31, 1944 – Christine King born, British historian and university administrator; expert on Nazi Germany; Vice-Chancellor and Chief Executive of Staffordshire University (1995-2011); Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

August 31, 1946 – Ann Coffey born, British Labour politician; Member of Parliament since 1992; Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Chancellor of the Exchequer (2007-2010); councilor to the Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council (1984-1992); social worker (1972-1988).

August 31, 1947 – Yumiko Ōshima born, Japanese manga artist and member of Year 24 Group; recipient of the 1973 Japan Cartoonists Association Award for Excellence for Mimoza Yakata de Tsukamaete.

August 31, 1954 – Julie Brown born, American comedian, scriptwriter, songwriter, actress, and television director. She got her first big break when Lily Tomlin saw her doing stand-up in a comedy club and gave her a part in the 1981 film, The Incredible Shrinking Woman. In 1984, Brown released her first album, Goddess in Progress, featuring her best-known satirical song, “Cause I’m a Blonde.” She wrote, produced, and co-starred in the 1988 hit film, Earth Girls Are Easy.

August 31, 1955 – Julie Maxton born in Scotland, British barrister, legal scholar, and academic administrator; a Master of the Bench of Middle Temple since 2012. She has been Executive Director of the Royal Society since 2011; Registrar of the University of Oxford (2006-2010); at the University of Auckland in New Zealand she was a lecturer, professor and acting Deputy Vice-Chancellor (1985-1992), Professor of Law (1993-2000), and then Dean of the Faculty of Law (2000-2005).

August 31, 1956 – Mária Balážová born, Slovak contemporary artist, sculptor, and printmaker; member of the artists’ group East of Eden.

August 31, 1956 – Tsai Ing-wen born, Taiwanese Democratic Progressive politician, legal scholar, and attorney; current President of Taiwan (the Republic of China) since 2016, the first president of both Hakka and aboriginal descent, and the first to be elected without previously serving as Mayor of Taipei. She campaigned with her cat.

August 31, 1980 – Laura Mulleavy born, American fashion designer and filmmaker who co-founded the fashion label Rodarte with her sister Kate Mulleavy in 2005.

August 31, 1982 – G. Willow Wilson born, American comics writer, prose author, essayist, and journalist. Known for her graphic novel, Cairo, written after living in Egypt. She relaunched the Ms. Marvel title for Marvel Comics, featuring 16-year-old Muslim superhero Kamala Khan. She converted to Islam in 2003, and taught English in Cairo, where she met a physics teacher, and they became engaged. He moved with her to the U.S. and is a legal advocate for refugees. Wilson has contributed articles to several publications, including the Atlantic Monthly, and The New York Times Magazine. She was the first Western journalist granted a private interview with Ali Gomaa after his promotion to the position of Grand Mufti of Egypt. In 2010, Wilson released a memoir, The Butterfly Mosque, about life in Egypt during the Mubarak regime. Her 2019 historical novel, The Bird King, is set in Granada in the 1400s.

August 31, 2019 – Ken Macdonald, former director of public prosecutions, spoke about why the prosecution declined to offer evidence in the 2004 trial of whistleblower Katherine Gun. In 2003, Gun was a British translator for the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), a UK intelligence agency, when she leaked top-secret information to The Observer, concerning a request by the United States for compromising intelligence on diplomats from member states of the Security Council, who were due to vote on a second United Nations resolution on the prospective 2003 invasion of Iraq. She was charged with an offense under the Official Secrets Act. Gun’s case became a cause célèbre among anti-war activists, and many people stepped forward to urge the government to drop the case, including Reverend Jesse Jackson, and Daniel Ellsberg (who had leaked the Pentagon Papers). Macdonald insisted that the case was not dropped to stop the Attorney General's advice on the legality of the Iraq War from being revealed, but because Gun would not have received a fair trial without the disclosure of information that would have compromised national security. Gavin Hood, the director of Official Secrets, the docudrama about Katherine Gun, expressed skepticism about Macdonald's statement and called for the declassification of the official documents referred to by Macdonald.

August 31, 2020 – The Chinese government confirmed its detention of an Australian citizen. Cheng Lei was born in China but her family immigrated to Australia when she was a child, and she became an Australian citizen. She had been working as a TV anchor for CGTN, a Chinese state-controlled English news broadcaster for the past eight years, until she was detained in Beijing. Her last tweet was on August 12. Her profile and videos featuring her previous stories on CGTN’s website were removed from online platforms and social media. The Australian government was notified of her detention on August 14, 2020. Cheng was not charged, but is being held under “residential surveillance at a designated location.” It is a form of detention in which Chinese investigators can imprison and question a suspect for up to six months while cutting them off from lawyers and the outside world — all before they have even been formally arrested. Cheng Lei is the second Australian to be detained in Beijing. Writer and former Chinese Government employee Yang Hengjun was taken by authorities in January 2019. He is under an espionage investigation, and the Chinese Government refused to allow his lawyers access to him for over 19 months. In September 2020, a government official said Cheng Lei was "suspected of carrying out criminal activities endangering China’s national security," but no details about the accusations were provided. The International Federation of Journalists said her detention was "without cause or reason" and "deeply concerning". Cheng was finally formally arrested in February 2021 "on suspicion of illegally supplying state secrets overseas," according to a statement from Australia's foreign minister Marise Payne.

August 31, 2021 – President Joe Biden issued a statement on the Texas law which bans abortion after six weeks, and turns members of the public into bounty hunters who can sue anyone suspected of seeking, performing, or facilitating an abortion after the first six weeks, which will take effect on September 1, 2021: “This extreme Texas law blatantly violates the constitutional right established under Roe v. Wade and upheld as precedent for nearly half a century. [It will] significantly impair women’s access to the health care they need, particularly for communities of color and individuals with low incomes.”

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Sources

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

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Nature’s Hard Working Single Moms –
Orcas

Orca mom and baby - photo by Hiroya Minakuchi

Orcas are highly intelligent marine mammals. Though they are also called killer whales, they are actually a large species of dolphins. The females and their offspring live in matrilineal pods.

When it comes to caring for baby orcas, the males are nowhere to be found. The mothers to raise their young with help from other females. Orcas have very long pregnancies, up to 18 months. Newborn baby orcas depend exclusively on their mothers for milk for one to two years and then for food until they learn how to hunt, and they remain with their mothers and grandmothers their entire lives. Because of this intense parenting, orca moms usually only calf every five years.

Orca females live 60+ years, and raising their young together boosts orca babies’ chances of survival because older females in the family pods help babysit, care for, and feed the young. Sometimes other younger females will also assist mothers in raising their young.

The Southern Resident orcas are a genetically distinct population in the Pacific Northwest, and with only 74 remaining individuals, they are on the verge of extinction.

THIS WEEK IN THE WAR ON WOMEN

Trailblazing Women and Events in Our History

Sources

Nature’s Hard Working Single Moms – Orcas

**Trailblazing Women and Events in Our History**

Nature’s Hard Working Single Moms –
Orcas