Welcome to WOW2!
WOW2 is a twice-monthly sister blog to This Week in the War on Women. This edition covers women and events from October 1 through October 16.
This is an on-going, evolving project. So many women have been added to the lists over the past three years that even changing the posts from monthly to twice a month, the pages keep getting longer and more unwieldy – an astonishing and wonderful problem to have!
For the entire previous EARLY OCTOBER list as of 2017, click HERE: www.dailykos.com/...
Otherwise, what you’re seeing on this Early October 2018 page are only the NEW people and events, or additional information, found since last year.
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 is up now, so be sure to go there next and catch up on the latest dispatches from the frontlines:
www.dailykos.com/...
Early October’s Women Trailblazers and Events in Our History
Note: All images and audios are below the person or event to which they refer
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- October 1, 1526 – Dorothy Stafford born, Lady Stafford, who married her distant cousin Sir Henry Stafford. A staunch Protestant, she and her family went into exile in Switzerland during the reign of Mary I, but she returned to England with her children in 1559, after the coronation of Elizabeth I. She was appointed as Mistress of the Robes to Queen Elizabeth, holding the office until Elizabeth’s death in 1603, becoming the queen’s trusted confidant, and having considerable influence with her. Her son Edward became the English Ambassador to France in 1578, largely due to her influence. Noted as a “continual Remembrancer of the Suits of the Poor” on her funeral monument
- October 1, 1862 – Esther Boise Van Deman born, a leading American archaeologist; first woman to specialize in Roman field archaeology, establishing the standards for dating ancient constructions using variations in building materials, which advanced the study of Roman architecture; author of The Building of the Roman Aqueducts and The Atrium Vestae
- October 1, 1924 – Leonie Gibson Kramer born, Dame Leonie Kramer, Australian academic; in 1968, she became the first woman full professor of English in Australia. She was also the first woman to chair the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (1982-1983), and the first woman chancellor of the University of Sydney (1991-2001); Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (1982) and a Companion of the Order of Australia (1993)
- October 1, 19 31 – Spain adopts women’s suffrage
- October 1, 1940 – Phyllis Chesler born, American writer, psychotherapist, and feminist; noted for her best-selling seminal book, Women and Madness; her other work covers gender issues, mental illness, divorce, child custody, incest, surrogacy, second-wave feminism, pornography, prostitution, violence against women, and honor killings; co-founder of the International Committee for Women of the Wall to promote religious rights of Jewish Women in Jerusalem
- October 1, 1949 – Sheila Gilmore born, Scottish, British Labour Party politician; Member of Parliament for Edinburgh East (2010-2015); Edinburgh District Council member (1991-2007), appointed Convenor of Housing (1999)
- October 1, 1950 – Susan Greenfield born, Baroness Greenfield of Ot Moor, British scientist, author, broadcaster, Life Peer and member of the House of Lords since 2001; noted for work on treatments for Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease; also interested in the neuroscience of consciousness and the impact of technology on the brain; senior research fellow at Lincoln College, Oxford; chancellor of Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh (2005-2013); director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain (1998-2010)
- October 1, 1977 – Christel Takigawa born in Paris, Japanese television announcer and news presenter for Kyodo Television; FNN News Japan newscaster (2002-2009)
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- October 2, 1718 – Elizabeth Montagu born, English reformer, “Queen of the Blues” (Bluestockings, literary intellectuals) who was noted for her literary salon which included Samuel Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, Elizabeth Carter, David Garrick, Fanny Burney, and Sarah Fielding and Horace Walpole. She was also a patron of the arts, up-and-coming writers in particular. In 1760, she wrote and contributed anonymously three sections to Dialogues of the Dead, and in 1769, published under her name An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear. When her much older husband died in 1775, she inherited his substantial fortune, and the following year, adopted her orphaned nephew Matthew Robinson, making him her heir. A collection of her letters was published posthumously, many of them written to her sister, Sarah Scott, who was novelist and translator
- October 2, 1926 – Jan Morris born James Humphrey Morris, Welsh historian, author and travel writer; known particularly for the Pax Britannica trilogy (1968–1978), a history of the British Empire, and for portraits of cities, notably Oxford, Venice, Hong Kong, and New York City. A trans woman, she published under her birth name until 1972, when she transitioned from a male to a female identity
- October 2, 1941 – Diana Hendry born, English poet, children’s author and short story writer; won the 1991 Whitbread Award for best children’s book for Harvey Angell
- October 2, 1943 – Anna Ford born, English journalist and television news reader who worked for for Granada TV (1974-1977), ITN (1978-1981) and the BBC (1977-1978 and 1986-2006); she helped launch TV-am, the first British breakfast television programme (1981)
- October 2, 1955 – Dame Nancy Rothwell born, British physiologist, President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Manchester since 2010; one of the directors of AstraZeneca, the pharmaceuticals company; co-chair of the Council for Science and Technology; noted for research on Brown adipose tissue and Cytokines; Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire since 2005
- October 2, 1968 – Victoria Derbyshire born, English journalist and broadcaster; her current affairs and debate programme has been on BBC Two and the BBC News Channel since 2015
- October 2, 1973 – Melissa Harris-Perry born, American writer, academic, and political commentator on African-American politics; host of the Melissa Harris-Perry show on MSNBC (2012-2016); she taught political science at the University of Chicago (1999-2006); Associate Professor of political science and African-American studies at Princeton (2006-2011), leaving when she was denied a full professorship; Founding Director of the Anna Julia Cooper Project, a center for study of Southern race, gender and politics, at Tulane University (2011-2014); regular columnist for The Nation magazine; author of Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America
- October 2, 1973 – Maria Wetterstrand born, Swedish Green Party politician and Spokesperson (2002-2011) with Peter Eriksson, Member of the Riksdag (Sweden’s parliament, 2001-2011)
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- October 3, 1373? – (date uncertain) Jadwiga of Poland born, the first woman monarch of the Kingdom of Poland, reigned from 1384 to 1399
- October 3, 1899 – Gertrude Berg born as Tillie Edelstein, American pioneer in radio, who wrote, produced and starred in the long-running serial comedy-drama The Rise of the Goldbergs,later called The Goldbergs, about the Jewish family of Molly and Jake Goldberg who live in a Bronx tenement. The first 15-minute episode aired on November 20, 1929 on the NBC radio network. She wrote almost all 5,000 of the show’s radio episodes, and a 1948 Broadway adaptation, Me and Molly. In 1949, CBS put The Goldbergs on television. Gertrude Berg won the very first Emmy Award for Lead Actress in a Comedy Series for the show’s debut season. In 1951, her co-star Philip Loeb, who played Jake Goldberg, was blacklisted when his name appeared in Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television. The series was canceled as a result of Loeb’s participation, and both networks and sponsors insisted Loeb be fired as a condition of the show returning to air, despite Gertrude Berg’s protests. Loeb resigned rather than cause Berg trouble. He received a generous severance package from the show, but he sank into a depression that ultimately drove him to suicide in 1955. The Goldbergs returned a year after Loeb departed the show and continued until 1954, after which Berg also wrote and produced a syndicated film version
- October 3, 1906 – Natalie Savage Carlson born, American children’s book author who wove family stories and folktales from her French Canadian heritage into her early book, The Talking Cat and Other Stories of French Canada. Noted for The Family Under the Bridge, and The Orphelines books
- October 3, 1949 – Laurie Simmons born, American artist, photographer and filmmaker; part of The Pictures Generation, a group of artists whose work was shown in a 2009 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art; notable for her Black Series, photographs of rooms she constructed with dollhouse furniture and replicas of iconic, easily recognizable artworks, and her 2006 film, The Music of Regret
- October 3, 1951 – Kathryn D. Sullivan born, American geologist, oceanographer and NASA astronaut; a crew member on three Space Shuttle missions, she became the first American woman to walk in space on October 11, 1984. Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans, and Atmosphere Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (2014-2017)
- October 3, 1955 – Buket Uzuner born, Turkish best-selling novelist, and travelogue and short story writer; noted for her travelogues about being a solo woman backpacker, including Travel Notes of An Urban Romantic, and her 2013 novel İstanbullular (English title is I Am Istanbul) and her first novel İki Yeşil Susamuru, Anneleri, Babaları, Sevgilileri ve Diğerleri (translated as Two Green Otters, Mothers, Fathers, Lovers and All the Others); she was awarded Turkey’s Yunus Nadi prize for her novel Balık İzlerinin Sesi (translated as The Sound of Fishsteps)
- October 3, 1958 – Chen Yanyin born, Chinese sculptor; her first solo show, Box Series, was at the Shanghai Oil Painting and Sculpture Institute in 1994; she participated in several collaborative shows around the world, and some of her work was shown in Between Ego and Society: An Exhibition of Contemporary Female Artists in China at the Chicago Cultural Center
- October 3, 1958 – Louise Lecavalier born, Canadian contemporary dance icon; began her professional career as a member of Le Groupe Nouvelle Aire; joined Édouard Lock’s dance group, Lock Danseurs, in 1980, which quickly became La La La Human Steps, where she was the company’s principal dancer; her first work as a choreographer was So Blue, which premiered in Düsseldorf in 2012. Lecavalier was honored with the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement in dance in 2014
- October 3, 1961 – Rebecca Stephens born, British mountaineer, writer, motivational speaker, leadership coach, and journalist. She was the first British woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest, the third woman and the first British Woman to climb the Seven Summits. She is the founder of the leadership development company Seven Summits Performance Ltd; a presenter on BBC television science series Tomorrow’s World (1994-1996)
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- October 4, 1932 – Ann Thwaite born, British biographer; her book, AA Milne: His Life, was the 1990 Whitbread Biography of the Year; she is also the author of children’s books, such as The Camelthorn Papers, and Gilbert and the Birthday Cake
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- October 5, 1899 – Elda E. Anderson born, American physicist and health researcher; During WWII, she worked on the Manhattan Project at Princeton University and the Los Alamos Laboratory, where she prepared the first sample of pure uranium-235. After the war, she became the first chief of education and training in the Health Physics Division of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. President of the Health Physics Society (1959-1960), and established the professional certification agency known as the American Board of Health Physics in 1960. She developed leukemia, then breast cancer, and died in 1961 at age 61
- October 5, 1900 – Bing Xin born as Xie Wanying, prolific Chinese poet, novelist, translator and children’s author; elected as a member of the National Senate in 1940, Bing Xin literally translates as “ice heart,” meaning a morally pure heart; The Photograph is an English language translation of her novel, about an American music teacher at a missionary school who adopts an 8-year-old Chinese girl
- October 5, 1900 – Margherita Bontade born, Italian Christian Democracy politician; served in the Chamber of Deputies (1948-1968); the Christian Democracy party was a Catholic-inspired, centrist party founded in 1944, which died out in 1994
- October 5, 1939 – Marie-Claire Blais born, French Canadian novelist, poet and playwright; noted for her first book, La Belle Bête (Mad Shadows), Une Saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel (A Season in the Life of Emmanuel), and L’Ange de la solitude (The Angel of Solitude). Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada since 1986; winner of the 1996 Governor General’s Literary Award
- October 5, 1939 – Consuelo Ynares-Santiago born, lawyer and judge; Justice of the Supreme Court of the Philippines (1999-2009); Court of Appeals (1990-1999); Regional Trail Court Judge (1986-1990); Municipal Judge (1973-1986)
- October 5, 1944 – French women get the right to vote
- October 5, 1946 – Zahida Hina born in India, Pakistani Urdu-language columnist, essayist, short story writer, novelist and playwright; worked as journalist for Jang (1988-2005) and the Daily express, Pakistan; also writes a weekly column in Rasrang, the Sunday magazine of Dainik Bhaskar, India’s largest Hindi newspaper. She is a critic of nuclear energy for any purpose. Has received many awards, including Saghir Siddiqui Adabi Award, Sindh Speaker Award, and a 2001 SAARC Literary Award given by India’s President
- October 5, 1946 – Michèle Pierre-Louis born, Haitian independent politician; the second woman Prime Minister of Haiti (2008-2009), the first was Claudette Werleigh (1995-1996); Pierre-Louis has been the Executive Director of the Knowledge and Freedom Foundation since 1995
- October 5, 1964 – Korina Sánchez born, Filipina television journalist, news anchor, field correspondent, radio news anchor and newspaper columnist, Currently Chief Correspondent for the Integrated News and Current Affairs Division of ABS-CBN Corporation, and columnist for The Philippine Star
- October 5, 1971 – Tonia Antoniazzi born, British Labour politician; Member of Parliament for Gower since 2017; she and five other Labour MPs resigned their roles as Labour front benchers to protest the party’s Brexit position, which was to abstain in a vote on whether Britain would remain in the single market by joining the European Economic Area (EEA). The renegade MPs voted in favour of the EEA
- October 5, 1972 – Annely Akkermann born, Estonian politician; Member of the Estonian parliament, Riigikogu, since 2011, and serves on the Ecology Committee and the Select Budgetary Committee. She is also chair of the women’s association of IRL-Naiskogu (IREN)
- October 5, 2002 – The first International Day of No Prostitution, supported by the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women
- October 5, 2010 – Peace activist Mairead Corrigan Maguire lost her appeal against being deported from Israel. She had been denied entry into the country, and then held in a Tel Aviv airport detention facility since her arrival six days earlier for a Nobel women’s peace visit. The Israeli government had instituted a 10-year ban against her for her participation in a Gaza-bound flotilla in 2009, attempting to bring humanitarian aid to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Maguire co-founded Women for Peace with Betty Williams, now called the Community for Peace People. Maguire and Williams were awarded the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to bring about a peaceful solution to The Troubles in Northern Ireland
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- October 6, 1729 – Sarah Crosby born, considered the first woman to be a Methodist preacher. She and Mary Bosanquet were the most popular women preachers of Methodism of their day, and worked together, co-founding an orphanage, first in Leytonstone, and then moving it to Yorkshire. Crosby continued traveling and preaching, writing that she had traveled 960 miles in the year 1777 alone, until rheumatism curtailed her travels, but she was still teaching and preaching at local meetings the week before her death in 1804
- October 6, 1789 – Louis XVI returns to Paris after the Women’s March on Versailles, when hundreds of market women, joined by many sympathizers, came to complain about the scarcity and high price of bread which was brought on by deregulation of the grain market, and they demand the return of the king, his family and the French Assembly to Paris
- October 6, 1895 – Caroline Gordon born, American novelist and literary critic; associated with the Southern Agrarian writers in the 1930s. She was awarded the O. Henry Award second-place prize for her 1934 short story “Old Red,” which placed higher than short stories by William Saroyan, Pearl S. Buck, Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Thomas Wolfe. Also noted as mentor to novelists Walker Percy and Brainard Cheney
- October 6, 1897 – Florence B. Seibert born, American biochemist who found that the cause of fever in many patients after being given intravenous injections was contamination during the distillation of water being used in the injections, and developed a device to prevent contamination; but Seibert is best known for indentifying the active agent in the antigen tuberculin as a protein, and isolated a purified form which became the basis of the development and use of the first reliable test for TB, which quickly became the international standard tuberculin test. For this breakthrough, she received the Trudeau Medal from the National Tuberculosis Association in 1938, the American Chemical Society’s Francis P. Garvan Medal in 1942, and the first Achievement Award given by the American Association of University Women in 1943. She was at the Henry Phipps Institute at the University of Pennsylvania from 1932 to 1959, and was finally made a full professor of biochemistry in 1955, just four years before her retirement. Seibert inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1990
- October 6, 1900 – Vivion Lenon Brewer born, American activist for desegregation. She was a graduate in 1917 of the high school which later was called Little Rock Central High School, in Little Rock, Arkansas, and went on to get degrees in sociology and the law. In 1957, Governor Orval Faubus called out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent nine black students from entering Central High School, and a majority of citizens of Little Rock voted to close the city’s public high schools rather than integrate them. In 1958, Brewer was a founding member with Adolphine Fletcher Terry of the Women’s Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools (WEC). Brewer became WEC’s chair and spokesperson, making her the target of threats and offensive phone calls and mail. Schools were re-opened in 1959, and she resigned as chair of the WEC in 1960. She wrote about the WEC in The Embattled Ladies of Little Rock: 1958-1963, The Struggle to Save Public Education at Central High
- October 6, 1901 – Eveline Du Bois-Reymond Marcus born, German-Brazilian zoologist, artist and academic; she and her husband, Ernst Marcus, collaborated in studies of several invertebrate groups between 1924 and 1936, but when he was dismissed from his professorship at Berlin University due to the rise of Nazism, they moved to São Paulo, Brazil, where he taught at the University of São Paulo, where they mainly studied freshwater and land invertebrates. After her husband’s death in 1968, she continued their studies, publishing about 30 papers, mostly on opistobranch molluscs. In 1973, she was elected an Honorary Member of the Brazilian Malacological Society and in 1979 of the Malacological Society of London. She was also awarded title of Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of São Paulo in 1976
- October 6, 1915 – Carolyn D. Goodman born, American clinical psychologist, opponent to McCathyism in the 1950s, and prominent civil rights advocate after her son Andrew and two other civil rights workers were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Neshoba County, Mississippi in 1964; co-author with Brad Herzog of My Mantelpiece: A Memoir of Survival and Social Justice
- October 6, 1939 – Sheila A. Greibach born, theoretical computer scientist; currently Emeritus Professor; professor in the UCLA Computer Science Department since 1970; member of the faculty of the Harvard Division of Engineering and Applied Physics (1963-1969); noted for work in formal computing languages, automata, compiler theory, and context-sensitive parsing using the stack automaton model. The Greibach normal form, and Greibach’s theorem are named in her honor
- October 6, 1952 – Ayten Mutlu born, Turkish poet, writer and translator, specializing in translating women poets from antiquity
- October 6, 1956 – Kathleen Webb born, American comic book artist and writer; one of the first women writers for Archie Comics
- October 6, 1965 – Peg O’Connor born, Feminist philosopher; Professor of Philosophy and Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota; noted for work on Wittenstein’s approach to ethics, the philosophy of addiction, and gender equity in the field of philosophy; author of Life on the rocks: finding meaning in addiction and recovery, and co-author of Feminist interpretations of Ludwig Wittgenstein
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- October 7, 1819 – Ann Eliza Brainerd Smith born, American novelist, poet, essayist and group organizer; she used the penname Mrs. J. Gregory Smith for her work, including her novels, Seola, Selma, and Atla, and her non-fiction book, From Dawn to Sunrise. Her husband, J. Gregory Smith, was governor of Vermont (1863-1865), and instrumental in obtaining medical care for Vermont soldiers at the front, and securing the right of soldiers in the field to vote by absentee ballot. On October 19, 1884, the northern-most event of the U.S. Civil War occurred in Smith’s town of St. Albans, Vermont. Confederate raiders robbed the town’s banks, killed one resident and wounded another, then went to the Smith home. Governor Smith was in Montpelier for the session of the legislature. Mrs. Smith, home with only her daughters and a woman servant, appeared at the front door with a pistol (unloaded, but the only weapon she could find), and the Confederates decided to move on, fleeing for the border to Canada. She organized the people of St. Albans to mount a pursuit, attempting unsuccessfully to stop the raiders from crossing the border. In 1870, Vermont Governor Peter Washburn, who had been Adjutant General of the Vermont Militia during the war, presented her with an honorary commission as a lieutenant colonel on his military staff. Smith was president of the committee for the Vermont Woman exhibit at the Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia
- October 7, 1888 – Edna Meade Colson born, African American educator and activist; in spite of obstacles she faced because she was a black woman, she got her B.A. in 1915, and a Ph.D. in 1940, which made her a champion higher education for black Americans. Colson taught from 1915 until her retirement in 1953 at the Virginia Normal and Industrial Institute, renamed the Virginia State College for Negroes in 1930 (now Virginia State University). In 1937, she was chair of the committee that organized the first graduate studies program at the school. She was among the first women who registered to vote after the 19thAmendment was ratified, and one of the first African American women to be a lifetime member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
- October 7, 1953 – Linda Griffiths born, Canadian performer, primarily on stage, and playwright, noted for her one-woman play Maggie and Pierre in which she played both Pierre and Margaret Trudeau
- October 7, 2011 – The winners of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize are announced: Yemeni women’s rights activist Tawakkul Karman, Liberian activist Leymah Gbowee, and Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf
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- October 8, 1807 – Harriet Taylor Mill born, English philosopher and women’s rights advocate; second wife of John Stuart Mill, who influenced his views on the status of women
- October 8, 1930 – Faith Ringgold born, African American artist, noted for her narrative quilts, masks and sculptures. She was also an activist for civil and women’s rights, and was a member of Women Artists in Revolution (WAR), and co-founded Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation (WSABAL). In 1950, she had enrolled at City College of New York, but was not allowed to major in art because at the time art education was the only art-related major open to women at CCNY. She got her BA in 1955, and began teaching in NY public schools, and earned her Master’s in 1959. A trip to Europe that year, and two trips to West Africa in 1976 and 1977 all had a profound impact on her work. Also wrote and illustrated 17 children’s books
- October 8, 1937 – Merle Park born in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), British prima ballerina with the Royal Ballet, where she started in the corps de ballet in 1954, then became a soloist in 1958, and a principal dancer in 1962; best remembered for her Giselle, but was often paired with Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov
- October 8, 1946 – Hanan Ashrawi born, Palestinian Third Way politician, activist and scholar, a leader during the First Intifada, and Palestinian Delegation spokesperson during the Middle East peace process; first woman elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council; also served on advisor boards for the World Bank, the UN Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD)and the International Human Rights Council; chair of the English Department at Birzeit University (1973-1978 and 1981-1984) and Dean of its Faculty of Arts (1986-1990); founder in 1974 of the Birzeit University Legal Aid and Human Rights Action Project; awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in 2003
- October 8, 1946 – Bel Mooney born, English journalist, broadcaster, author and columnist; has written for Nova magazine, New Statesman, Daily Mirror, The Sunday Times, and is a weekly columnist for the Daily Mail; Mooney was a broadcaster for BBC Radio 4 (1982-2008), notably for Devout Sceptics; novelist and children’s author, known for her best-selling children’s series Kitty and Friends, and children’s novel The Voices of Silence,awarded a NY Public Library Book of the Year citation
- October 8, 1949 – Ashawna Hailey born as Shawn Hailey, American computer scientist, creator of the HSPICE program used by much of the semiconductor industry to simulate and design silicon chips; founder of Meta-Software, which later became part of Synopsis; she was a trans woman; noted as an activist for the reform of laws on creational drugs; after her death in 2011, a $10 million USD bequest was shared between Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. The ACLU, Drug Policy Alliance, Marijuana Policy Project and Second Harvest Food Bank
- October 8, 1949 – Sigourney Weaver born as Susan Weaver, American actress and three-time nominee for Academy Awards, environmental activist who campaigns to protect oceans by ending deep-sea trawling, and honorary chair of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund
- October 8, 1950 – Shannon C. Stimson born, American political theorist, philosopher and economics historian; Professor of Political Science at University of California Berkeley since 1991, and presently serves on the editorial board of the Adam Smith Review; author of The American Revolution in the law: Anglo-American jurisprudence before John Marshall, and co-author of After Adam Smith: a century of transformation in politics and political economy
- October 8, 1950 – Janice E. Voss born, American electrical engineer with a doctorate in aeronautics & astronautics from MIT; NASA astronaut (1990 group), who flew in space as a mission specialist on five missions, and participated in the first Shuttle rendezvous with the Mir Space Station in 1995; she died in 2012 from breast cancer
- October 8, 1958 – Ursula von der Leyen born in Belgium, German Christian Democratic Union politician; first woman and current Minister of Defence for Germany since 2013; Deputy Leader of the CDU party since 2009; Minister for Labour and Social Affairs (2009-2013); as Minister of Family, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth (2005-2009), instituted extensive blocking of child pornography on the internet, which was overturned as censorship by the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), the federal criminal police office; member of the Bundestag for Lower Saxony since 2009; noted for support of equal opportunities for women in politics, and same-sex marriage/adoption rights
- October 8, 1971 – Pinar Selek born, Turkish sociologist, feminist and author; advocate for the rights of vulnerable communities in Turkey, including women, the poor, street children, sexual minorities, and Kurdish communities. She is the author of several books published in Turkish, German, and French, and was one of the founding editors of Amargi, a Turkish feminist journal. Selek is currently living in exile in France, because of a 20-year series of prosecutions connected to a 1998 explosion in Istanbul’s Spice Bazaar which killed 7 people and wounded about 100 others. The arrest is widely considered as motivated by her work with the Kurds, particularly her contact with the banned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). Her academic research papers were confiscated, and she refused to name the individuals she had interviewed for her project. She spent 2 ½ years in prison, ill-treated and tortured, but was released in 2002 when a team of experts issued reports which concluded that the explosion had been caused by the accidental ignition of a gas cylinder, not a bomb. She has since been tried and acquitted of all charges in four trials, in 2006, 2008, 2011, and 2014, but in 2017 the Chief Prosecutor of the Supreme Court demanded that her most recent acquittal be reversed, and her case is once again being considered; Interpol ignored the Turkish government’s warrant for her arrest
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- October 9, 1823 – Mary Shadd Cary born, American-Canadian abolitionist, journalist and the first black woman newspaper editor in North America, of the Provincial Freeman, in Windsor, Canada, which helped freed slaves know their rights; she graduated as a lawyer from Howard University School of Law at the age of 60 in 1883, becoming the second black woman in the United States to earn a law degree
- October 9, 1934 – Jill Ker Conway born in Australia, academic, historian and author; first woman president of Smith College (1975-1985); she engaged in creative circumvention of Massachusetts welfare laws so single-parent scholarship students wouldn’t have to choose between welfare benefits to support their families or scholarships to continue their education, leading to a change in Massachusetts welfare laws enabling students to keep both their benefits and scholarships
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- October 10, 1870 – Louise Mack born, Australian novelist, poet and journalist-columnist, pioneering woman war correspondent; she was traveling in Europe as a correspondent for the London Daily mail in 1914, and became an eye witness to the WWI German invasion of Antwerp, Belgium; the Evening News and the Daily Mail published her accounts of what she saw; her diary of the time she spent behind enemy lines was later published as A Woman’s Experiences in the Great War
- October 10, 1903 – The Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) is founded by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia in Manchester, later moving operations to London. Militant organization campaigning for suffrage for British women; slogan was “Deeds, not words”
- October 10, 1908 – Mercè Rodoreda born, Spanish notable Catalan-language novelist and short story writer; Catalan is spoken primarily in Catalonia, Valencia, and the Balearic Islands
- October 10, 1911 – Clare Hollingworth born, English journalist and author; in 1939, as a reporter for The Daily Telegraph traveling from Poland to Germany, she saw and reported German forces massed on the Polish border, and became the first war correspondent to report the outbreak of WWII; she was at the scene when the King David Hotel in Jerusalem was bombed in 1946, and reported on the Algerian War in the early 1960s; she broke the story of Kim Philby’s defection to the Soviet Union in 1963, and covered the Vietnam War beginning in 1967
- October 10, 1924 – Ludmilla Tchérina born, French prima ballerina, and choreographer
- October 10, 1938 – Lily Tuck born, American author; her novel The News from Paraguay won the 2004 National Book Award for Fiction
- October 10, 1952 – Dame Dela Smith born, British educator and authority on special needs education; Headteacher at the special education school Beaumont Hill Technology College (1992-2010), where students are ages 5 to 19, with a wide range of special education needs
- October 10, 1953 – Fiona Rae born in Hong Kong, British artist, part of the visual arts group, Young British Artists, who first exhibited together in 1988; elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 2002
- October 10, 1974 – Lucy Powell born, British Labour and Co-operative politician; Member of Parliament for Manchester Central since 2012
- October 10, 2017 – New Yorker magazine publishes allegations by 3 women that Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein had raped them, and statements of 10 more women that Weinstein sexually assaulted or harassed them. Weinstein’s wife Georgina Chapman announced she is leaving him, calling his reported actions “unforgivable.” This followed after an October 5 report published in the New York Times, detailing allegations of decades of sexual harassment by Weinstein, including statements from actresses Rose McGowan and Ashley Judd, and the October 8 firing of Weinstein by the board of his company
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- October 11, 1793 – Maria James born in Wales, American poet; emigrated to the U.S. with her family at age 7; after she was found to make neat stitches but sewed too slowly, her apprenticeship to a dressmaker was ended, and she went into domestic service, most often as a nursery maid. She wrote poetry in her limited spare time. In 1833, Sarah Nott Potter returned from a visit to friends, and showed her husband, Bishop Alonzo Potter, a copy of a poem written by a young woman in service to the family she visited . The Bishop was intrigued, and sought more poems written by Maria James. In 1839, he arranged for the publication of Wales and other Poems, with a lengthy introduction written by himself, telling readers that Maria James “solaced a life of labor with intellectual occupations,” and that “her achievements should be made known to repress the supercilious pride of the privileged and educated.”
- October 11, 1841 – Lucy Field Wanzer born in Wisconsin; her family moved to California in 1858. She applied to the Toland Medical College in San Francisco, but was rejected. In 1873, the school was absorbed into the University of California system, and Wanser appealed her rejection to the UC board of regents. She was admitted, after a four-month appeal that set a precedent allowing other women to attend medical schools throughout the UC system. Even though she was hazed by some male students, and one professor told her any woman who wanted to study medicine should have their ovaries removed, to which she replied that male students should have their testicles removed, Wanzer graduated with honors in 1876. After graduation, she’s admitted to the San Francisco County Medical Society, but only after threats to “blackball” her failed. Her private practice, in a series of downtown San Francisco offices, focused on obstetrics and gynecology. In 1890, she was elected president of the University of California Medical Department Alumni Society. Wanzer was also a practicing pediatrician, and helped establish the San Francisco Children’s Hospital 1967
- October 11, 1946 – Elinor Goodman born, British journalist; political editor of ITN’s Channel 4 News (1988-2005); political correspondent for Channel 4 (1982-1988); since her 2005 retirement from journalism, chair of the Affordable Rural Housing Commission of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA)
- October 11, 1957 – Dawn French born, British comedian and writer; best known for co-writing and starring in the BBC comedy sketch show French and Saunders with comedy partner Jennifer Saunders, with whom she won the 1991 Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award for TV-Light Entertainment for French and Saunders
- October 11, 1991 – Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, law professor Anita Hill accuses Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexually harassing her; Thomas reappears before the panel to denounce the proceedings as a “high-tech lynching.”
- October 11, 2011 – The U.N. declares October 11 as the International Day of the Girl Child honoring efforts of ‘Day of the Girl’ youth-led movement in the U.S.
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- October 12, 1908 – Ann Petry born, black American novelist, short story and children’s book writer; her 1946 novel, The Street, is the first novel by an African American women to sell over a million copies
- October 12, 1923 – Jean Nidetch born, American entrepreneur, founder of Weight Watchers
- October 12, 1930 – Milica Kacin Wohinz born, Slovenian historian, noted for her seminal study of the forceful Italianization of the Slovene minority in Italy between 1918 and 1943, and the anti-Fascist resistance of the Slovenian and Croatian people from the 1920s into the 1940s
- October 12, 1944 – Angela Rippon born, English broadcast journalist and writer; the first woman journalist who became a permanent presenter on the BBC national television news – there were several other women who appeared on newscasts earlier but she was the first with a long-term position, working from 1974 to 2002 on several different programmes
- October 12, 1956 – Catherine Holmes born, Australian judge; current Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Queensland since 2015, the first woman to hold the position; appointed to the court in 2000; a founding member of Queensland’s Women’s Legal Service in 1984
- October 12, 1958 – Maria de Fátima Silva de Sequeira Dias born, Azorean author historian and professor in the Department of Management and Economics at the University of the Azores; authority on the history of the Azores, an autonomous region of Portugal, and of the history of Judaism in the Azores
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- October 13, 1905 – British Suffragettes Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney storm a political meeting in Manchester, England, demanding to know if the Liberal government will grant women the right to vote. When police forcibly remove them from the meeting, Pankhurst spits on one officer, and both women are arrested. They refuse to pay the fine, and go to jail, stirring up press attention. This is often regarded as the first militant action of the Suffragette movement. On October 17, Kenney writes to her sister Nell that she has been released from Manchester’s Strangeways Prison, where there were “over one hundred people waiting” for her. She was given a “lovely bouquet of flowers” “from the Oldham Socialists.” She also reports that over 2,000 people had attended a protest meeting on her behalf the night before. “Manchester is alive I can assure you.” Her letter was discovered in the 21st century, languishing in the British Columbia Archives, by historian Lyndsey Jenkins, who was doing research on Kenney and her family. Annie’s letter wound up in Canada because Nell emigrated there with her husband in 1909. The letter was filed under Nell’s married name, so its significance was overlooked
- October 13, 1924 – Moturu Udayam born, Indian politician and women’s rights activist; Secretary General of the Andhra Pradesh Mahila Sangham, a women’s collective in the southeastern Indian state (1974?-1992), and vice president of the All India Democratic Women’s Association (1981-2001); she and her husband were communists, and underground twice, 1940-1945 and 1949-1951. During these exiles, she organized the first all-women Burrakatha group (a traditional form of story-telling previously only performed by men) which was part of an anti-fascist campaign. She was also the first known woman in Andhra Pradesh to ride a bicycle
- October 13, 1961 – Rachel De Thame, English Horticulturist, garden expert and BBC 2 presenter on Gardener’s World, and Small Town Gardens; co-host for the BBC’s annual coverage of the Chelsea Flower Show. "I absolutely think women and men are equal in the world of horticulture and design, though there was one occasion when I was filming at the Chelsea Flower Show and I wasn't allowed to breastfeed.”
- October 13, 2011 – Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the new Prime Minister of Denmark (2011-2015), presents her new coalition government; Denmark's first woman Prime Minister
- October 13, 2015 – Playboy magazine announces it will stop publishing photographs of fully nude women, beginning with a redesigned issue in March 2016. Chief Executive Scott Flanders explains, "You're now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free. And so it's just passé at this juncture." The magazine’s circulation had fallen from 5.6 million in 1975 to 800,000 in 2015, while its web traffic quadrupled after it eliminated nudity in August 2014
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- October 14, 1861 – Julia A. Ames born, American journalist, editor and temperance reformer; associate editor of the Women’s Temperance Publishing Association’s Union Signal and a volunteer at “The Anchorage,” a mission in Chicago for outcast women run by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). She died at age 30 of typhoid pneumonia in 1891
- October 14, 1897 – Alicja Dorabialska born, Polish chemist who studied under Marie Curie after she earned her Ph.D. from the University of Warsaw. She was an assistant in the Institute of Physical Chemistry in Warsaw University of Technology from 1918 to 1932. She was appointed an assistant professor in the department of physical and inorganic chemistry of Lviv Polytechnic in 1934, then served as the department chair during WWII. In 1945, Dorabialska was promoted to full professor, and served as dean of the chemistry department (1945-1951)
- October 14, 1955 – Iwona M. Blazwick born, British art critic and lecturer; Director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery since 2001; supporter of young artists’ work; author of numerous monographs and articles on contemporary artists, art movements, and art history
- October 14, 1979 – 200,000 people join the first Washington DC March for Lesbian and Gay Rights
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- October 15, 1908 – Olivia Ensor Coolidge born in Britain, American author of historical books for Young Adults, many about Ancient Greeks and Romans; and biographies for adults, including one on Edith Wharton
- October 15, 1922 – Agustina Bessa-Luís born, Portuguese writer and executive; director of the daily newspaper, O Primeiro de Janeiro, (1986-1987); director of the D. Maria II National Theatre in Lisbon (1990-1993); noted for her novel, translated as The Lands of Risk
- October 15, 1924 – Marguerite Andersen born in Germany, Canadian French-language author, noted for Le Figuier sur le toit, which won a 2009 Trillium Award
- October 15, 1943 – Penny Marshall born, American actress, producer and director, noted for directing Big, the first film directed by an American woman to gross over $100 million USD in the U.S.; other films include Awakenings, A League of Their Own and Renaissance Man
- October 15, 1955 – Emma Elizabeth Clark born, British children’s book author and illustrator, known for her Blue Kangaroo series
- October 15, 2007 – U.N. General Assembly adopts a resolution designating October 15 as International Day of Rural Women
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- October 16, 690 – Wu Zetian ascends to the throne of the Tang dynasty, proclaiming herself ruler of the Chinese Empire; she is the sole officially recognized Empress Regnant of China in over two millennia
- October 16, 1384 – Jadwiga is crowned “King” of Poland, the first female monarch of the Kingdom of Poland, and rules from 1384 until her death in 1399; after her marriage, she is co-King with her husband, Jogaila, Grand Duke of Lithuania, a heathen who converted to Catholicism in order to marry her; she becomes a very successful mediator between his quarreling kinsmen, and uses her persuasive skills to convince the people of Ruthenia to switch their loyalty from Hungary to Poland
- October 16, 1831 – Lucy Stanton born, free-born African American abolitionist and women’s rights supporter; she became the first black woman to complete a four-year course of study at an American college when she graduated in 1850 from a ‘Ladies Literary Course’ (women took fewer classes and weren’t eligible for Bachelor of Arts degrees) at Oberlin College. Her step-father was an active participant in Cleveland Ohio’s branch of the Underground Railroad, so there were often fugitives hidden at her home as she grew up. He also founded the Cleveland Free School which Stanton attended; after college, she worked as a free school principle, a teacher and a seamstress. In 1866, she was sent by the Cleveland Freedmen’s Aid Society to teach newly freed slaves, first in Georgia, and then in Mississippi. Later, she moved to Tennessee. In 1900, she moved to Los Angeles. In 1904, she was a founder of the Sojourner Truth Industrial Club for the large numbers black working women seeking better employment opportunities in California
- October 16, 1847 – The novel Jane Eyre, written by Charlotte Brontë, is published in London as Jane Eyre, An Autobiography, “edited by Currier Bell.” It revolutionized prose fiction by revealing Jane’s moral and spiritual growth and her emotional conflicts through an intimate, first-person narrative. Many of the reviews at the time were negative, some condemning it as “anti-Christian,” in violation of “every code human and divine” and fostering “rebellion at home”
- October 16, 1869 – Girton College, Cambridge is founded, England’s first residential college for women. Women are originally only granted titular degrees – the title of a Bachelor or Master of Arts, but not full rights – they couldn’t vote in the university Senate, sit on committees, or use the library, museums, or laboratories of Cambridge
- October 16, 1928 – Mary Daly born, American radical lesbian feminist philosopher, academic and theologian; taught classes in theology, feminist ethics and patriarchy at the Jesuit-run Boston College (1967-1999); She was threatened with dismissal in 1968 after publication of her first book, The Church and the Second Sex, but was given support by the then all-male student body, and later was granted tenure. Ironically, she would later be forced out after refusing to admit male students to her advanced women’s studies classes, which violated university policy and its interpretation of Title IX, even though she did allow men in her introductory class, and tutored males students separately who wanted to take advanced classes; noted for her second book, Beyond God the Father
- October 16, 1948 – Alison Chitty born, British theatre production designer, and set and costume designer; honored with two Olivier Awards for Best Costume Design, 2001 for Remembrance of Things Past at the Royal National Theatre, and 2007 for The Voysey Inheritance, Royal National Theatre
- October 16, 1956 – Marin Alsop born, American conductor and violinist; musical director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra since 2007, the first woman to hold the position with a major American orchestra; the first (and the second woman) to conduct the BBC’s Last Night of the Proms in the Royal Albert Hall, London
- October 16, 1956 – Meg Rosoff born, American Writer based in London; noted for her first novel How I Live Now, which won the Guardian Prize, and the Printz Award, and her second novel, Just in Case, winner of the Carnegie Medal for the best children’s book
- October 16, 1959 – Tessa Munt born, British Liberal Democrat politician; Member of Parliament for Wells (2010-2015); Somerset County Hall councilor since 2017; member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
- October 16, 1965 – Kang Kyung-ok born, South Korean Manhwa (cartoon) artist; noted for It’s Two People and Narration in Love at 17
- October 16, 1977 – Laura Wade born, English Playwright; noted for her plays Limbo, 16 Winters, Colder Than Here and Breathing Corpses
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