Welcome to WOW2 — Early December !
WOW2 is a twice-monthly sister blog to This Week in the War on Women. This edition covers women and events from December 1 through December 16.
The purpose of WOW2 is to learn about and honor women of achievement, including many who’ve been ignored or marginalized in most of the history books, and to mark moments in women’s history. It also serves as a reference archive of women’s history. There are so many more phenomenal women than I ever dreamed of finding, and all too often their stories are almost unknown, even to feminists and scholars.
These trailblazers have a lot to teach us about persistence in the face of overwhelming odds. I hope you will find reclaiming our past as much of an inspiration as I do.
This Week in the War on Women
just posted, so be sure to go there next and catch up
on the latest dispatches from the frontlines:
www.dailykos.com/...
Early December Women Trailblazers and Events in OUR History:
- December 1, 1083 – Anna Komnene born, Byzantine princess, scholar, physician, hospital administrator, and historian; author of the Alexiad, an account of her father’s reign which is now the main source of Byzantine political history for the period; she administered a large hospital and orphanage in Constantinople, and taught medicine there; considered an expert on the treatment of gout; after she was involved in a plot to overthrow her brother when he took the throne after her father’s death, she forfeited her estates, spending her late years in the convent of Kecharitomene, studying philosophy and history
- December 1, 1847 – Christine Ladd-Franklin born, mathematician, logician and psychologist, Color and Color Theories
- December 1, 1893 – Dorothy Detzer born, worked at Hull House investigating child labor infringements; national secretary of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF / 1924-1946); known as the “Lady Lobbyist” by members of Congress, respected for research and integrity – no personal favors, private dinners or backroom deals
- December 1, 1919 – Lady Astor becomes the first female Member of Parliament to take her seat in the U.K. House of Commons
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December 1, 1952 – The New York Daily News reports the story of Christine Jorgensen, the first notable case of sex reassignment surgery
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December 1, 1954 – Dame Judith Hackitt born, British chemical engineer and civil servant; Chair of the UK Health and Safety Executive (2008-2016)
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December 1, 1955 – Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on a bus to a white person; her arrest sparks the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a landmark in the modern U.S. civil rights movement
- December 2, 1777 (traditional) – Philadelphia housewife and nurse Lydia Darragh saves the lives of General George Washington and his Continental Army when she overhears the British planning a surprise attack on Washington’s army for the following day
- December 2, 1884 – Ruth Draper born, noted solo performer and dramatist, whose range of original characters were much admired during her 40 years of entertaining audiences all over the world in multiple languages; The Italian Lesson, Three Women and Mr. Clifford, and Doctors and Diets are three of her best-known works
- December 2, 1886 – Josephine Roche born, first female police officer in Denver (1912); gained control of her late father’s Colorado coal mine operation (1927) and invited United Mine Workers to organize workers and negotiate contracts; appointed to supervise Public Health Service as part of FDR’s administration, made recommendations for Social Security and was an advocate for universal health coverage (1935)
- December 2, 1900 – Herta Hammersbacher born, German landscape architect and lecturer/professor at TU Berlin (1946-1969); worked on 3,500 private and public projects in Berlin, including gardens at the Waldfriedhof Zehlendorf cemetery
- December 2, 1911 – Harriet Fleischl Pilpel born, lawyer, women’s rights activist, on both Kennedy and Johnson Commissions on Status of Women, chaired Planned Parenthood Law Panel International, 1st vice chairwoman of ACLU’s National Advisory Council. In 1961, she argued on behalf of Planned Parenthood in Poe v. Ullman, asking the Supreme Court to reverse a Connecticut law criminalizing birth control. She wrote Planned Parenthood's amicus curiae brief for that case as well as that for 1965's Griswold v. Connecticut. Pilpel was convinced that the right to privacy upheld in Griswold could be extended to a woman's right to abortion. She put abortion on the ACLU Biennial Conference agenda in 1964 (the board did not take up the issue until 1967.) Pilpel wrote Planned Parenthood’s amicus brief for Roe v. Wade, strategizing with Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee
- December 2, 1923 – Maria Callas born, Greek-American operatic soprano, “La Divina,” famous for bel canto voice, won world acclaim for dramatic interpretation of a wide range of roles
- December 2, 1924 – Else Marie Pade born, Danish composer noted for early electronic works; part of the Danish resistance in WWII, she was held in the Frøslev prison camp (1944-1945)
- December 2, 1939 – Yaël Dayan born, Israeli politician, peace activist, author and newspaper columnist; member of the Knesset (1992-2003) and chair of the Committee on the Status of Women, campaigning for Israel’s sexual harassment law; chair of Tel Aviv city council (2008-2013); noted for her memoir, Israel Journal: June 1967
- December 2, 1942 – Anna G. Jónasdóttir born, Icelandic political scientist, social theorist and gender studies academic at GEXcel International Collegium for Advanced Transdisciplinary Gender Studies; author of Why Women Are Oppressed
- December 2, 1945 – Penelope Spheeris born, American film director-producer and screenwriter, primarily of documentaries, including her trilogy, The Decline of Western Civilization; has also directed feature films, including Wayne’s World
- December 2, 1948 – Elizabeth Berg born, American nurse-turned-novelist; Durable Goods, a 1993 ALA Best Book of the Year, Talk Before Sleep, The Last Time I Saw You
- December 2, 1948 – Patricia Hewitt born in Australia, British Labour politician; after nine years as General Secretary of the National Council for Civil Liberties, she was elected as the first woman MP for Leicester West (1997-2010); Minister for Women (2001-2005), Secretary of State for Health (2005-2007)
- December 2, 1952 – Carol Shea-Porter born, U.S. Representative (D-New Hampshire 2007-2011, 2013-2015, and the current incumbent)
- December 2, 1963 – Ann Patchett born, American author; her novel Bel Canto won the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction; also noted for The Patron Saint of Liars, and her non-fiction work, The Mercies, in The Pushcart Prize XXXVII: Best of the Small Presses 2013
- December 2, 1980 – A Salvadoran death squad rapes and murders four American Catholic missionaries, three nuns and lay missionary Jean Donovan, who wrote to a friend shortly before they were murdered:
- December 2, 1988 – Benazir Bhutto is sworn in as Prime Minister of Pakistan, the first woman to head a democratic government in a Muslim majority nation
- December 3, 1838 – Octavia Hill born, British social reformer, advocate for the working poor, especially for improving housing and saving open green spaces for recreation
- December 3, 1842 – Ellen Swallow Richards born, American chemist; first woman admitted to MIT; pioneer in sanitary engineering and first to apply chemistry to the study of nutrition
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- December 3, 1842 – Phoebe Hearst born, American feminist, suffragist, and philanthropist benefactor and director of the Golden Gate Kindergarten Association, which had 26 schools in San Francisco before the 1906 earthquake, also funded teacher training programs; first woman Regent of the University of California, Berkeley; founder of the University of California Museum of Anthropology
- December 3, 1842 – Ellen Swallow Richards born, 1st woman graduate from MIT (1873), creator of the fields of ecology and home economics, co-founder of Association of Collegiate Alumnae, now called American Association of University Women
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- December 3, 1895 – Anna Freud born, Austrian-English psychologist and psychoanalyst; pioneer in child psychology
- December 3, 1895 – Te Ate born, interpreter of Cherokee, Chickasawa, Creek, Choctaw tribes in theatrical performances which entertained and educated. Inspired Eleanor Roosevelt and visiting British royalty
- December 3, 1910 – Freda du Faur, Australian mountaineer and one of the leading climbers of her day, becomes the first woman to scale Aoraki (Mount Cook) in New Zealand
- December 3, 1938 – Sally Shlaer born, American mathematician, software engineer; co-developer of the Shlaer-Mellor method of software development
- December 3, 1942 – Alice Schwarzer born, German journalist, feminist, author and founder-publisher of the feminist journal EMMA
- December 3, 1954 – Grace Andreacchi born, American novelist, poet and playwright; Music for Glass Orchestra, Raphael and Tobias, Songs for a Mad Queen
- December 3, 1967 – Marie Françoise Ouedraogo born, Burkinabé mathematician and academic in the Mathematics Department of the University of Ouagadougou; president of the African Mathematical Union Commission on Women in Mathematics in Africa (2009-present)
- December 4, 1829 – In the face of fierce local opposition, British Governor-General Lord William Bentinck issues a regulation declaring that anyone who abets suttee in Bengal is guilty of culpable homicide (widow burning herself to death on her husband's funeral pyre) — the rest of British India follows his lead
- December 4, 1865 – Edith Cavell born, British nurse, executed by the Germans for helping Allied soldiers escape over enemy lines during WWI
- December 4, 1882 – Constance Davey born, Australian psychologist who started the special education classes in South Australia, and developed university courses on working with special needs children for teachers and social workers; author of Children and Their Law-makers, published in 1956
- December 4, 1920 – Jeanne Sobelson Manford born, teacher and gay rights activist, co-founder of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG), for which she was awarded the 2012 Presidential Citizens Medal
- December 4, 1922 – Lucille Atcherson becomes 1st woman US Diplomatic Consular Officer at Bern legation in Switzerland, then later served in Panama. A woman suffragist, and WWI volunteer who helped wounded Americans and French civilian war survivors, for which she was honored with Medaille de la Reconnaissance Francaise
- December 4, 1939 – Joan Brady born in San Francisco, American-British author; the first woman and first American to win the Whitbread Book of the Year Award for her novel Theory of War (1993)
- December 4, 1945 – Roberta Bondar born, Canada’s first woman astronaut, and first neurologist in space, aboard NASA Space Shuttle Discovery in 1992; served as NASA’s head of space medicine (1993-2004)
- December 4, 1947 – Jane Lubchenco born, American environmental scientist and marine ecologist; Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Undersecretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere (2009-2013)
- December 4, 1956 – Nia Griffith born in Ireland of Welsh parents, British Labour politician; MP for Llanelli (2005 to present); Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Modern Languages since 2015 (she speaks English, Welsh, Italian, French and Spanish); chief concerns are climate change and the impact of industry; a leading Welsh LGBT figure
- December 4, 1961 – The female contraceptive 'pill' becomes available on the National Health Service in Britain
- December 4, 1966 – Suzanne Malveaux born, twin sister of Suzette M. Malveaux; American television journalist; former NBC Pentagon correspondent; moderator of the 2007 National Association of Black Journalists convention; a key reporter in CNN’s 2004 and 2006 election coverage; CNN White House correspondent; co-anchor of Around the World (2012-2014)
- December 4, 1966 – Suzette M. Malveaux born, twin sister of Suzanne Malveaux; lawyer and law professor; expert on civil rights law and class action litigation; appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court in Wal-Mart v. Dukes, a gender discrimination in pay and promotion suit
- December 4, 1978 – Dianne Feinstein becomes San Francisco's 1st female and first Jewish mayor, appointed after the assassinations of Mayor Moscone and Councilman Milk
- December 4, 2011 – In Singapore hundreds of people gathered at a park to protest sexual violence against women as part of the global "SlutWalk" movement, a rare public demonstration in the tightly controlled city state
- December 5, 1822 – Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz born, American naturalist; co-founder in 1894 and first president (1900-1903) of Radcliffe College; co-founder with husband Louis Agassiz of the Anderson School of Natural History; with Mary Fairfax Somerville and Maria Mitchell, one of the first three women members of the American Philosophical Society
- December 5, 1830 – Christina Rossetti born, British poet and author
- December 5, 1890 – Mildred Olmsted born, woman suffragist and birth control advocate, civil rights and peace activist, promoter of nonviolent protest, first executive director of Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, served on boards of SANE and the ACLU
- December 5, 1986 – Ann Nolan Clark born, American writer and teacher who taught at the Tesuque Pueblo school, first through fourth grade one-room-schoolhouse, for 25 years; many of her stories were inspired by her students; the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs published 15 of the books based on her Pueblo experiences; In My Mother’s House, illustrated by Pueblo artist Velino Herrera, was a 1942 Caldecott Honor book
- December 5, 1912 – Kate Simon born in Poland, best-selling American travel writer, and autobiographer, whose first volume, Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood was nominated for a National Book Critics Award
- December 5, 1934 – Joan Didion born, novelist and essayist, Play It as It Lays
- December 5, 1935 – Mary McLeod Bethune founds National Council of Negro Women
- December 5, 1953 – Gwen Lister born in South Africa, Namibian journalist, publisher, apartheid opponent and freedom of the press activist; co-founder of independent weekly Windhoek Observer; won 1992 International Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists, and 2004 Courage in Journalism Award from International Women’s Media Foundation
- December 5, 1961 – Laura Flanders born in England, American-based broadcast journalist and non-fiction author; Women’s Desk founding director at the media watch group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting)
- December 5, 1979 - Sonia Johnson is formally excommunicated by the Mormon Church for her outspoken support of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution
- December 6, 1731 – Sophie von La Roche born in Bavaria, author of the first German novel written by a woman, Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim (History of Lady Sophia Sternheim)
- December 6, 1815 – Jane Swisshelm born, suffragist, newspaper publisher and journalist, wrote for women’s rights, and against slavery, capital punishment and legal inequities, nursed wounded Union soldiers during the Civil War, was a close friend of Mary Todd Lincoln. Fired from her government job for publishing criticism of President Andrew Johnson
- December 6, 1875 – Evelyn Underhill born, English Catholic writer and pacifist; her best-known work, Mysticism, published in 1911, widely read through the 1930s
- December 6, 1884 – Cornelia Meigs born, American author, playwright, and academic; won the 1915 Drama League prize for The Steadfast Princess, and the 1933 Newbery Medal for Invincible Louisa, about Louisa May Alcott
- December 6, 1887 – Lynn Fontanne born, actor, usually starred on stage with husband Alfred Lunt, played 160 parts, many created by playwrights especially for them
- December 6, 1888 – Libbie Hyman born, zoologist and author, known for her six-volume treatise, The Invertebrates
- December 6, 1893 – Sylvia Townsend Warner born, English novelist and poet; noted for Summer Will Show, an early lesbian love story set in Paris during the 1848 revolution
- December 6, 1898 – Winifred Lenihan born, American actor, writer, and director; played Joan of Arc in the original 1923 American production of Saint Joan; directed radio plays; in 1925, became the first director of the Theater Guild's School of Acting; co-author of the play Blind Mice
- December 6, 1904 – Ève Curie born, French-American journalist and pianist; her biography of her mother, Madame Curie, won the 1938 National Book Award for Non-Fiction; worked on behalf of UNICEF(1965-1979)
- December 6, 1905 – Elizabeth Yates born, American author and journalist; won the 1951 Newbery Medal for Amos Fortune, Free Man; contributed articles, primarily about travel, to the New York Times
- December 6, 1908 – Herta Freitag born, Austrian-American mathematician; her family fled the invading Nazis in 1938, first to England, and then to the U.S.; Hollins College mathematics professor and later department chair (1948-1971); frequent contributor to the Fibonacci Quarterly
- December 6, 1908 – Gertrud “Trudy” Späth-Schweizer, first woman to hold elective office in Switzerland
- December 6, 1916 – Yekaterina Budanova born, Russian WWII fighter pilot, one of the world’s two fighter aces, killed in action in 1943
- December 6, 1927 – Patsy Mink born, 1st Japanese-American Congresswoman (D-HI), wrote Women’s Educational Equity Act, played key role in enactment of Title IX, renamed posthumously the “Patsy Takemoto Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act”
- December 6, 1950 – Helen Liddell, Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke, born, Scottish Labour politician, British High Commissioner to Australia (2005-2009); Secretary of State for Scotland (2001-2003); MP for Monklands East (1994-1997); BBC Scotland economics journalist (1976-1977)
- December 6, 1951 – Wendy Ellis Somes born, English Royal Ballet principal ballerina, now ballet producer
- December 6, 1955 – Anne Begg born, Scottish Labour politician; MP for Aberdeen South (1997-2015); first permanent wheelchair user in the House of Commons since 1880; vocal supporter of Stem Cell research, and rights of the disabled
- December 6, 1959 – Deborah L. Estrin born, American computer scientist; founding director of the NSF-funded Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) at UCLA; Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science; Cornell Tech’s first academic hire for their NYC high-tech campus
- December 6, 1989 – Montreal Massacre: Anti-feminist gunman murders 14 women at the École Polytechnique in Montreal; Canadian National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women, White Ribbon Day
- December 6, 1967 – Helen Greiner born, co-founder of iRobot and CEO of CyPhyWorks, Trustee of Boston Museum of Science, on Worcester Polytechnic Institute Computer Science Advisory Board, and a Director of National Defense Industrial Association
- December 7, 1801 – Abigail Hopper Gibbons born, abolitionist, teacher and social welfare activist
- December 7, 1873 – Willa Cather born, American author, 1922 Pulitzer Prize for her novel One of Ours
- December 7, 1902 – Hilda Taba born in Estonia, American educator; even with a Master’s degree from Bryn Mawr College, and attending Columbia University’s Teachers College, when she applied for a position at Tartu University, she was turned down because she was a woman, so she became curriculum director at the Dalton school in New York City; author of the influential Curriculum Development: Theory and Practice (1962)
- December 7, 1915 – Leigh Brackett born, American author, primarily of science fiction, The Sword of Rhiannon and The Hounds of Skaith; screenwriter, The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye and The Empire Strikes Back
- December 7, 1941 – Melba Pattillo Beals born, civil rights activist, and journalism teacher; member of the Little Rock Nine, the first black students to integrate Central High School in Little Rock AR in 1957; author of Warriors Don’t Cry, the story of that school year; the Little Rock Nine were each awarded a Congressional Gold Medal
- December 7, 1941 – Annie Fox, chief nurse in the Army Nurse Corps at Hickam Field during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, becomes the first woman awarded the Purple Heart for combat. At that time, no requirement for Purple Heart recipient to be injured, but requirements changed after Pearl Harbor and her Purple Heart was later replaced by a Bronze Star because she wasn’t wounded in the attack
- December 7, 1943 – Susan Isaacs born, American novelist, essayist and screenwriter; Compromising Positions; Brave Dames and Wimpettes: What Women are Really Doing on Page and Screen
- December 7, 1947 – Anne Fine born, British children’s author; winner of Carnegie Medals for Goggle-Eyes and Flour Babies, which also won a Whitbread Award, and a Smarties Prize for Bill’s New Frock; British Children’s Laureate (2001-2003)
- December 8, 1660 – A woman (probably Margaret Hughes, but possibly Anne Marshall) appears on an English public stage for the first time, in the role of Desdemona in a production of Shakespeare’s play Othello — the first recorded British professional performance of a woman’s role by a woman instead of a man in drag
- December 8, 1869 – Jessie Belle Rittenhouse born, American literary critic and poet
- December 8, 1897 – Josephine Bell born, British physician, novelist and mystery writer under pen name Doris Bell Collier; noted for her series featuring Dr. David Wintringham; one of the founders of the Crime Writer’s Association
- December 8, 1919 – Julia Robinson born, mathematician, worked on resolution of Hilbert’s Tenth Problem and Gödel's first Incompleteness Theorem; First woman president of American Mathematical Society, awarded MacArthur Foundation grant, First woman mathematician elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- December 8, 1919 – Kateryna Yushchenko born, Ukrainian computer and information research scientist, developed the Address programming language; first woman in the USSR to become a Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences in programming
- December 8, 1922 – Jean Ritchie born, American folk music singer and songwriter, also a song collector, with her husband spending 18 months on a Fulbright scholarship tracing the links between American folk songs and the traditional music of Britain and Ireland
- December 8, 1925 – Carmen Martín Gaite born, Spanish author and screenwriter, El cuarto de atrás
- December 8, 1935 – Tatiana Zatulovskaya born in Soviet Russia, chess player, emigrated to Israel; three times Soviet Women’s Champion, and twice Women’s Senior World Champion
- December 8, 1947 – Margaret J. Geller born, American astrophysicist; noted for work on mapping the nearby universe, and her study of relationship between galaxies and their environment
- December 8, 1949 – Mary Gordon born, American novelist and literary critic; The Company of Women
- December 8, 1949 – Nancy Meyers born, mainstream American film director-producer and screenwriter; The Holiday, It’s Complicated, The Intern
- December 8, 1952 – On I Love Lucy, pregnancy is talked about on a TV show for the first time
- December 8, 1997 – Jenny Shipley is sworn in as the first female prime minister of New Zealand
- December 9, 1745 – Maddalena Laura Sirmen born, Italian violinist and composer
- December 9, 1779 – Tabitha Babbit born, Shaker toolmaker and inventor designed an improved spinning wheel head, and refined the circular saw
- December 9, 1870 –Dr. Ida S. Scudder born, third-generation American missionary in India; dedicates her life to fighting bubonic plague, cholera and leprosy; treating women who were not allowed to receive medical treatment from male doctors; and training Indian women as doctors and nurses; founder at the turn of the century of the Christian Medical College and Hospital in Vellore, India, still one of the foremost teaching hospitals in India
- December 9, 1897 – Marguerite Durand, inspired by covering the 1896 Congrès Féministe International (International Feminist Congress) for the leading French newspaper Le Figaro, founds the feminist daily newspaper La Fronde
- December 9, 1906 – Esther Peterson born, head of Kennedy administration Commission on the Status of Women, fought for improvements in working women’s conditions, awarded Medal of Freedom by President Carter in 1981
- December 9, 1906 – Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper born, major pioneer in computer science, invented the compiler and co-invented COBOL, computer programming languages, developed computer testing standards
- December 9, 1915 – Eloise Jarvis McGraw born, American author of books for children and young adults; won the Newbery award for her novels Moccasin Trail (1952), The Golden Goblet (1962), and The Moorchild (1997)
- December 9, 1943 – Joanna Trollope born, English historical and romance novelist (sometimes under pen name Caroline Harvey), playwright, and author of the non-fiction Britannia's Daughters: Women of the British Empire
- December 9, 1946 – Sonia Maino Gandhi born in Italy, Indian politician; Member of the Indian Parliament 1999 to present; Leader of the Opposition 1998-2004; President of the Indian National Congress 1998-2004
- December 9, 1948 – Marleen Gorris born, Dutch writer-director, outspoken feminist and LGBT rights supporter; became the first woman director whose film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, in 1995 for Antonia’s Line
- December 9, 1960 – Caroline Lucas born, British politician, co-leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, and her party’s first elected MP, serving Brighton Pavilion since 2010
- December 9, 2004 – Canada’s Supreme Court rules that same-sex marriage is constitutional
- December 10, 1815 – Ada Lovelace born, pioneering English mathematician and computer scientist pioneering computer programmer, who collaborated with inventor Charles Babbage in designing an “Analytical Engine”
- December 10, 1830 – Emily Dickinson born, one of the greatest and most original American poets; Hope is the thing with feathers
- December 10, 1869 – Wyoming is the first territory to give women the right to vote
- December 10, 1891 – Nelly Sachs born, German-Swedish poet and playwright, Nobel Prize laureate
- December 10, 1902 – Women are given the right to vote in Tasmania
- December 10, 1903 – Mary Norton born, English children’s author; The Borrowers series
- December 10, 1909 – Selma Lagerlöf becomes the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, Gösta Berling's Saga
- December 10, 1913 – Pannonica “Nika” de Koenigswarter born in Britain, champion of Jazz, author of Les musiciens de jazz et leurs trois vœux ("The jazz musicians and their three wishes"); served as a decoder, driver, and radio host for the Free French during WWII
- December 10, 1925 – Carolyn Kizer born, poet and women’s activist
- December 10, 1931 – Jane Addams becomes a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, the first American woman to be honored
- December 10, 1938 – Pearl S. Buck wins Nobel Prize for Literature, The Good Earth
- December 10, 1958 – Cornelia Funke born, bestselling German-American children’s author, the Inkheart trilogy
- December 10, 1992 - Senator Bob Packwood (R-OR) says he takes “full responsibility” and apologizes for “the conduct that it was alleged that I did" which he calls "unwelcome and offensive" actions toward women, but he refuses to resign. After evidence surfaces he submitted copies of his diary to the Senate Ethics Committee with damning sexual references edited out, and facing expulsion for lying, Packwood does finally resign in 1995
- December 10, 2007 – Cristina Fernandez is sworn in as Argentina's first elected female president
- December 11, 1863 – Annie Jump Cannon born, American astronomer; co-creator with Edward Pickering of the Harvard Classification Scheme; her cataloging work, classifying 350,000 stars, was a major contribution to the development of contemporary stellar classification; she had to overcome being nearly deaf throughout her career; a suffragist and member of the National Women’s Party, she worked to help women gain acceptance and respect within the astronomical community; The American Astronomical Society presents the annual Annie Jump Cannon Award for distinguished work in astronomy to female astronomers
- December 11, 1892 – Harriet Adams born, AKA “Carolyn Keene,” author/syndicator of the Nancy Drew series, worked with ghost writers on Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys and other popular juvenile series. Ran the Stratemeyer Syndicate, founded by her father, for 52 years
- December 11, 1900 – Hermína Týrlová born, Czech filmmaker, animator and screenwriter; produced over 60 animated shorts using puppets and stop action animation
- December 11, 1904 – ‘Marge’ Marjorie Henderson Buell born, American cartoonist, creator of the Little Lulu comic strip
- December 11, 1916 –Elena Garro born, Mexican novelist and playwright
- December 11, 1922 – Pauline Jewett born, Canadian Member of Parliament, first woman president of Canadian co-educational university, Director of the Institute of Canadian Studies, social justice and women’s rights advocate
- December 11, 1922 – Grace Paley born, author, poet and peace activist, The Little Disturbances of Man
- December 11, 1926 – Big Mama Thornton born, singer-songwriter
- December 11, 1977 – Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams, leaders of 'Peace People' (pro-peaceful resolution of 'the Troubles' in Northern Ireland) receive Nobel Peace Prize
- December 12, 1474 – Isabella crowns herself queen of Castile & Aragon
- December 12, 1873 – Lola Ridge born, anarchist poet, editor, feminist
- December 12, 1884 – Zinaida Serebriakova born, Russian-French painter; left Russia after the October Revolution and became a French citizen in 1947
- December 12, 1928 – Helen Frankenthaler born, American abstract expressionist artist
- December 12, 1940 – Dionne Warwick, Grammy Hall of Fame R&B singer, UN Global Ambassador
- December 12, 1945 – Portia Simpson-Miller born, Jamaican politician, leader of the People’s National Party 2006-2017; Prime Minister of Jamaica 2006-2007 and 2013-2016
- December 12, 1951 – Paula Ackerman, the first woman appointed to perform rabbinical functions in the U.S., leads services for the Temple Beth Israel congregation in Meridian, Mississippi
- December 12, 1962 – Ulrike Tillmann born, German mathematician and algebraic topologist; has made important contributions to study of moduli space of algebraic curves
- December 12, 1982 – Protesting against the proposed placing of U.S. Cruise missiles at the base, 20,000 women encircle the RAF Greenham Common Air Base; the encampment and protests lasted 19 years — with between 250 and 30,000 British women camped there at different times
- December 12, 2009 – Houston becomes the largest U.S. city to elect an openly gay mayor, with voters handing a solid victory to City Controller Annise Parker
- December 13, 1814 – Ana Néri born, first Brazilian nurse, who volunteered for the Brazilian Army’s health corps during the Triple Alliance Paraguayan War (1864-1870), founding a nursing house which cared for over 6,000 wounded soldiers; the first Brazilian School of Nursing is named for her; she is also listed in the Brazilian Book of Fatherland Heroes
- December 13, 1830 – Mathilde Fibiger born, Danish feminist, and novelist, Clara Raphael, Tolv Breve (Clara Raphael, Twelve Letters)
- December 13, 1871 – Emily Carr born, Canadian painter and author, inspired by the Pacific Northwest forests and the region’s indigenous peoples; one of Canada’s ‘Group of Seven’ painters
- December 13, 1883 –Belle da Costa Greene born, American librarian, worked at the Princeton University Library, then hired by J.P. Morgan to catalog and oversee his private collection; first director of the Pierpont Morgan Library (1906-1948)
- December 13, 1885 – Annie Dale Biddle Andrews born, American mathematician; first woman to earn a Ph.D, in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley; Constructive theory of the unicursal plane quartic by synthetic methods
- December 13, 1903 – Ella Jo Baker born, organizer, (1940s) field secretary for NAACP to build grassroots campaigns and develop local leaders, (1957-60) Executive Director of Southern Christian Leadership Conference, worked with Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.
- December 13, 1908 – Elizabeth Alexander born, British geologist and physicist; during WWII, correctly interpreted anomalous radar signals as caused by the sun, which led after the war to the development of radio astronomy; also did early work on the geology of Singapore
- December 13, 1934 – Antoinette Rodez Schiesler born, African-American chemist and astronomer; Director of Research at Villanova University; former Roman Catholic nun, and Episcopal priest
- December 13, 1942 – Anna Georges Eshoo born, American Democratic politician; the only Assyrian American in congress, and one of two congresswomen of Armenian descent; has served in the U.S. House of Representatives from two different California districts since 1993
- December 13, 1949 – R.A. MacAvoy born, American fantasy and scifi author; noted for Tea with the Black Dragon, The Book of Kells, and her Damiano and Lens of the World series
- December 13, 1950 – Dame Julia Slingo born, British meteorologist and climate scientist; chief scientist at the Meteorological Office (the U.K.’s national weather service) since 2009; former Director of Climate Research in the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) National Centre for Atmospheric Science, and founding Director of the Walker Institute for Climate System Research
- December 13, 1971 – Naomi Long, Northern Irish engineer and politician, 54th Lord Mayor of Belfast
- December 13, 1993 – Susan A. Maxman becomes first woman president of American Institute of Architects in its 135 year history
- December 14, 1631 – Anne Conway born, English philosopher; friend and correspondent of Henry More, of the Cambridge Platonist school; after she converted to Quakerism, her home was a center for Quaker activity; she was persecuted and imprisoned; author of Principia philosophiae antiquissimae et recentissimae (Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy)
- December 14, 1640 – Aphra Behn born, English playwright and author, one of the first women to earn her living as a writer
- December 14, 1789 – Marianna Szymanowska born, Polish pianist-composer
- December 14, 1851 – Mary Tappan Wright born, American novelist and short story writer; her first novel, Aliens (1902), a portrait of northerners in a racially tense Southern town, attracted much attention
- December 14, 1883 – Jane Cowl born, American stage and silent film actress, who also co-authored several plays with playwright and screenwriter Jane Murfin, under the joint pen name Allan Langdon Martin; their biggest hit was Smilin’ Through (1919)
- December 14, 1897 – Margaret Chase Smith born, 1st woman elected to both houses of Congress (R-ME), served 8 years in House of Representatives and 24 in Senate. 1st to challenge Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade in the Senate with her “Declaration of Conscience” on June 1, 1950, which concluded: “It is high time that we stopped thinking politically as Republicans and Democrats about elections and started thinking patriotically as Americans about national security based on individual freedom. It is high time that we all stopped being tools and victims of totalitarian techniques – techniques that, if continued here unchecked, will surely end what we have come to cherish as the American way of life.”
- December 14, 1908 – Mária Szepes born, Hungarian author, screenwriter and philosopher; her first novel, The Red Lion (1946), was banned by the communist regime in Hungary
- December 14, 1916 – Shirley Jackson born, American author, The Lottery
- December 14, 1941 – Ellen Willis born, American liberal political essayist, feminist, and the first popular music critic for the New Yorker
- December 14, 1946 – Patty Duke, actor, Academy Award winner, president of the Screen Actors Guild, and mental health advocate
- December 14, 1955 – Jill Pipher born, president of Association of Women in Mathematics (AWM, 2011-13), 1st director of Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (ICERM, 2011-), Elisha Benjamin Andrews Professor of Mathematics at Brown University
- December 14, 1961 – President’s Commission on the Status of Women is established to examine and eliminate discrimination against women
- December 14, 1968 – Kelley Armstrong born, Canadian fantasy novelist; noted for her series and trilogies, including Women of the Otherworld and Darkness Rising
- December 14, 1985 – Wilma Mankiller becomes the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma’s principle chief – 1st woman leader in modern history of a major Native American tribe
- December 15, 1815 – Jane Austen’s Emma is published
- December 15, 1896 – Betty Smith born, author and playwright, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
- December 15, 1913 – Muriel Rukeyser born, poet, social justice and feminist activist
- December 15, 1930 – Edna O’Brien born, Irish novelist, poet and short story writer
- December 15, 1942 – Kathleen Blanco born, first woman elected Governor of Louisiana
- December 15, 1952 – Julie Taymor born, American theatre, opera and film director; the first woman to win a Tony for directing a Broadway musical, for the stage version of The Lion King, and also won an Original Costume Design Tony for the show’s costumes
- December 15, 2009 –The Washington, D.C. City Council votes to legalize same-sex marriage
- December 16, 1630 – Mary Somerset, Duchess of Beaufort born, English gardener and botanist, whose collection of plant specimens and seeds numbered in the thousands; published a 12-volume herbarium
- December 16, 1717 – Elizabeth Carter born, English poet, classicist and translator; a member of the Bluestocking Circle; first to translate into English the extant works of Epictetus, the Greek stoic philosopher
- December 16, 1775 – Jane Austen born, English author, one of the most widely read authors in English literature – Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma
- December 16, 1787 – Mary Russell Mitford born, English author, poet and dramatist; noted for her five-volume Our Village, a collection of short stories and sketches
- December 16, 1843 – Josephine Shaw Lowell born, American charity worker and social reformer; first woman appointed to the New York State Board of Charities (1876-1889); founder of the New York Consumers League (1890), which campaigned for better wages and working conditions for women, publishing a “White List” of retail stores which treated their women clerks well (which initially had few stores on it), and inspired chapters in other cities across the nation, becoming the National Consumers League, a powerful lobbying group
- December 16, 1844 – Fanny Garrison Villard born, suffragist, philanthropist, helped feed and clothe newly freed slaves, as well as funding schools for their education, during Reconstruction, president (1898-1922) of NY Diet Kitchen Association, which provided the more nutritional food that doctors associated with the program would “prescribe” as cures for sick slum dwellers, was one of NAACP’s founders, an American Woman Suffrage Association member, worked with Women’s Peace Party, and helped found Barnard College, and the Harvard Annex (which became Radcliffe College)
- December 16, 1867 – Amy W. Carmichael born, Irish Protestant missionary and author, founder of a mission and orphanage in the Tamil Nadu state in India, where she served for 55 years; her work with girls and young women saved many of them from forced prostitution; Things as They Are: Mission Work in Southern India, Gold Cord
- December 16, 1869 – Bertha Lamme Feicht born, American mechanical engineer with a specialty in electricity; in 1893, she was the first U.S. woman to earn an engineering degree other than in civil engineering, and the first woman graduate in engineering from Ohio State University; first woman engineer hired by Westinghouse; her daughter Florence became a physicist for the U.S. Bureau of Mines
- December 16, 1895 –Marie Hall Ets born, American illustrator and children’s author; won the 1960 Caldecott Medal for her illustrations in Nine Days to Christmas, which she co-authored
- December 16, 1900 – Lucile Lortel born, American theatrical producer/co-producer/artistic director of nearly 500 plays, five of which were nominated for Tony Awards; noted for producing Marc Blitzstein's adaptation of the Bertolt Brecht-Kurt Weill Threepenny Opera, which ran Off Broadway for seven years, and the New York Times said “put Off Broadway on the map”
- December 16, 1901 – The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Beatrix Potter’s first book, is published, setting a new standard for children’s books and marking her first step to independence
- December 16, 1901 – Margaret Mead born, renowned American cultural anthropologist, lecturer, author: Coming of Age in Samoa, Male and Female: A Study of the Sexes in a Changing World
- December 16, 1916 – Ruth Johnson Colvin born, founder of the non-profit Literacy Volunteers of America (now ProLiterarcy Worldwide); worked with literacy specialists to develop training materials for volunteer tutors, now considered authoritative sources for basic literacy and ESL tutor training courses; awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2006, the same year she turned 100
- December 16, 1941 – Leslie Stahl born, American television journalist; recounts that on the night of the 1972 Nixon-McGovern election, her on-air studio chair was labeled “Female” in masking tape, instead of with her name as her colleagues chairs were; noted for her coverage of Watergate, which earned her a promotion to CBS White House Correspondent; since 1991, she has reported for 60 Minutes; when Katie Couric was hired in 2006, CBS news asked Stahl to take a $500,000 cut in pay to accommodate Couric’s salary; author of the memoir, Reporting Live
- December 16, 1949 – Dame Heather Hallet born, English judge; as a Bencher of the Inner Temple, she became the first woman to chair the Bar Counsel in 1998; appointed in 2005 as the fifth woman to sit in the Court of Appeal; since 2013, Vice-President of Criminal Division of the Court of Appeal
- December 16, 1955 – Carol Browner born, American lawyer and environmentalist; Director of the Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy (2009-2011), a position abolished by the Trump administration; Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA – 1993-2001)
- December 16, 1965 – Melanie Sloan born, Minority Counsel for the House Judiciary Committee, working on criminal justice issues for Ranking Member John Conyers (D-MI), and as Counsel for the Crime Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee, drafting portions of the 1994 Violence Against Women Act; District of Columbia Assistant U.S. Attorney (1998-2003); co-founder in 2003, and first Executive Director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) which publishes a “Most Corrupt Members of Congress” list; in November 2017, Sloan publicly accused John Conyers of harassment and verbal abuse when she worked for the House Judiciary Committee, and several other woman also came forward; Conyers has denied all the allegations, but recently announced his resignation
- December 16, 2012 – The gang rape and fatal torture of Jyoti Singh in the back of a Delhi bus sparks international outrage, and protests in India demanding tougher penalties for rape and sexual violence
- December 16, 2013 – Michelle Bachelet wins back the presidency of Chile in a runoff election; leading her opponent by 62 percent to 38 percent. Bachelet is the first Chilean leader to serve two terms since General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990)