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 November 1 through November 15.
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 NOVEMBER list as of 2017, click HERE: www.dailykos.com/...
Otherwise, what you’re seeing on this Early November 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 has posted, so be sure to go there next and catch up on the latest dispatches from the frontlines: www.dailykos.com/...
Early November’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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- November 1, 1148 – Empress Matilda’s disputed reign (1141-1148) as ‘Lady of the English’ ends as Stephen of Blois retakes the throne of England. She had been married at an early age to Holy Roman Emperor Henry V, but they had no children, and he died in 1125. After her only brother’s death in 1120, she was nominated by her father King Henry I of England as his heir, making his court swear an oath of loyalty to her and her successors, but this was not popular in the Anglo-Norman court. When Henry died in 1135, she was opposed by the barons, and her cousin Stephen of Blois took the throne. After four years with her second husband, Geoffrey of Anjou, in Anjou and Normandy, she crossed the channel to take the kingdom by force, but the power shifted back and forth battle by battle, and she was never able to fully reign. After Stephen took back the throne in 1148, she returned to Normandy, leaving her eldest son to continue the campaign – he would succeed to the throne as Henry II in 1154. For the rest of her life, she concerned herself with the administration of Normandy, acting on behalf of her son, and founding Cistercian monasteries
- November 1, 1917 – Zenna Henderson born, American science fiction and fantasy author; nominated for a Hugo Award in 1959 for her novelette Captivity; unlike many other women authors of science fiction at the time, she never used a male pseudonym
- November 1, 1938 – Nicholasa Mohr born in New York of Puerto Rican parents, one of the few Latina women authors in the 20th century to be published by major commercial publishing houses; her first book, Nilda (1973), which she also illustrated, won the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award; her second book, El Bronx Remembered was published by Harper & Row in 1975, and she became the first Latin woman to win the New York Outstanding Book Award
- November 1, 1953 – Jan Davis born, American astronaut and aerospace engineer; first worked for NASA at the Marshall Space Flight Center as an engineer, then named team leader in the Structural Analysis Division in 1986, where she worked on the Hubble Space Telescope; she became an astronaut in 1987, assigned to the Astronaut Office Mission Development Branch, then handled communications with Shuttle crews at Mission Control, and flew on three space shuttle missions, logging over 673 hours in space between 1992 and 1997
- November 1, 1978 – Helen Czerski born, English physicist and oceanographer; Research Fellow in the department of mechanical engineering at University College London; previously at the Institute for Sound and Vibration Research at the University of Southampton; much of her research focuses on ocean bubbles; regular presenter on science programs for the BBC, and has columns in BBC Focus magazine and the Wall Street Journal; author of Storm in a Teacup: The Physics of Everyday Life; won the 2018 Lord Kelvin Medal and Prize from the Institute of Physics
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- November 2, 1890 – Moa Martinson born, Swedish author of proletarian literature who portrayed conditions of the working class, especially the lives of working-class women. She started work at age 15, as a kitchen maid and apprentice pantry chef (responsible for refrigerated foods); her difficult first marriage, living in an area so isolated she gave birth to one of her sons alone on the kitchen floor, and the time’s economic hardships were vividly depicted in her semi-autobiographical books; Kvinnor och äppelträd (Women and Apple Trees), Kungens rosor (The King’s Roses), and Rågvakt (Rye Guard)
- November 2, 1946 – Michelle Cliff born in Jamaica, Jamaican-American author, noted for Abeng, No Telephone to Heaven, Free Enterprise, and Into the Interior, which feature the complex identify problems of people in the post-colonial age, and also address racial, gender and sexual identity issues. Cliff was a lesbian and a feminist, whose partner was poet Adrienne Rich. She was an associate of the Women’s Institute for Freedom of the Press
- November 2, 1977 – Emma Reynolds born, British Labour Politician; Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton North East since 2010
- November 2, 2016 – Pope Francis announced that the Catholic Church would probably never allow women to serve as priests. Pope John Paul II wrote in 1994 that Jesus chose only men as his apostles, and that, “The exclusion of women from the priesthood is in accordance with God’s plan for his Church.” Pope Francis said the letter indicated that the ban would likely endure forever. He had raised the hopes of advocates for ordaining women when he created a commission earlier in 2016 to study the possibility of women serving as deacons, who perform some of the functions of priests. Women did serve as deacons early in the church’s history
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- November 3, 1906 – Julia Boyer Reinstein born, American historian and teacher; she taught in the history department of the University of Buffalo, became the first town historian of Cheektowaga, New York, and a founder and president of the Erie County Historical Federation, made up of local historical societies in the county. Though she was a lesbian, she accepted a proposal of marriage from Dr. Victor Reinstein in 1942, and they were married until his death in 1984. She and her husband donated the property for the Reinstein Woods Nature Preserve, and built the Anna M. Reinstein Library in Cheektowaga. She made donations to Elmira College, her alma mater, toward establishing a Department of Women’s Studies
- November 3, 1917 – Annapurna Maharana born, Indian pro-independence activist; prominent social reform and women’s rights advocate; a close ally of Mahatma Gandhi
- November 3, 1918 – Elizabeth Paschel Hoisington born, U.S. Army officer, one of the first two woman to attain the rank of brigadier general; director of the Women’s Army Corps (1965-1971)
- November 3, 1919 – Květa Legátová, born Věra Hofmanová, Czech novelist and short story writer, noted for her collection of interconnected short stories in a fictional village, Želary, which one the Czech State Prize for Literature in 2002, which includes her novella, Jozova Hanule (Joza’s Hanule)
- November 3, 1920 – Oodgeroo Noonuccal born Kathleen Walker, Australian Aborigine activist who campaigned for Aboriginal rights, poet, artist and educator; Queensland state secretary of the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, and a key figure in the campaign to reform the Australian constitution to give Aborigines full citizenship; first Aboriginal Australian to publish a book of verse
- November 3, 1935 – Ingrid Rüütel born, Estonian folklorist and philologist; she was Estonia’s First Lady during her husband’s term as President (2001-2006)
- November 3, 1947 –Mazie Hirono born, American Democratic politician; U.S. Congresswoman from Hawaii (2007-2013); Hawaiian U.S. Senator since 2013
- November 3, 1962 – Jacqui Smith born, British Labour politician; Member of Parliament for Redditch (1997-2010); Britain’s first woman Home Secretary (2007-2009)
- November 3, 1965 – Ann Scott born, French novelist; noted for her 2000 book Superstars, which has gained a cult following
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- November 4, 1940 – Marlène Jobert born in Algeria to a Sephardic Jewish family, French actress and author who left acting in the late 1970s to concentrate on writing children’s books and books about classical composers, including Mozart, Chopin and Tchaikovsky
- November 4, 1941 – Lyndall Gordon born, South African-English biographer and academic; senior research fellow at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford; noted for Eliot’s Early Years won the British Academy’s 1978 Rose Mary Crawshay Prize; Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life won the 1984 James Tait Black Prize for Biography; Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life won the 1994 Cheltentham Prize for Literature
- November 4, 1942 – Patricia Bath born, American ophthalmologist, inventor and humanitarian; first black person to serve as a resident in ophthalmology at New York University; the first African-American woman doctor to receive a patent for a medical purpose, and now holds four patents; first woman member of the Jules Stein Eye Institute; first woman to lead a post-graduate training program in ophthalmology, and first woman elected to the honorary staff of the UCLA Medical Center. In 1976, Bath co-founded the non-profit American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness, and its president
- November 4, 1948 – Alexis Hunter born in New Zealand, contemporary painter and photographer who worked in London; member of the Women’s Workshop of Artists Union (1972-1975) and the Woman’s Free Arts Alliance; explored the importance of tattoos as cultural art and commentary, and did several series of photographs related to feminist theories, including a photograph in her 1978 How to Make it in a Man’s World series entitled The Marxist Housewife (Still Does the Housework), showing a manicured hand cleaning a poster of Karl Marx, referencing both class issues and Marx’s lack of recognition of domestic labour in his writing
- November 4, 1958 – Anne Sweeney born, American business executive; co-chair of Disney Media, President of the Disney–ABC Television Group, and the President of Disney Channel from 1996 to 2014; Lucy Award from Women in Film in Los Angeles in 2002; inducted into the Broadcasting and Cable Hall of Hall in 2005
- November 4, 1960 – Kathy Griffin born, American comedian and social commentator who has been frequently in hot water because of her ‘nothing off-limits’ style, actress, and outspoken supporter of LGBT rights; she has also done two USO tours to entertain U.S. troops
- November 4, 2012 – Fauzia Yusuf Haji Adan is nominated as Somalia’s first woman Foreign Minister. She is confirmed, and serves in the cabinet both as Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister from 2012 to 2014
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- November 5, 1917 – Jacqueline Auriol born, French aviator and test pilot, one of the first women to break the sound barrier; she also set five world speed records in the 1950s and 1960s; her autobiography, I Live to Fly, was published in 1970
- November 5, 1922 – Violet Barclay born, also used name Valerie Barclay, American illustrator and pioneering female comic-book artist
- November 5, 1953 – Joyce Maynard born, American novelist and newspaper and magazine journalist; noted for her 1992 novel, To Die For, drawn from the Pamela Smart murder case
- November 5, 1962 – Turid Birkeland born, Norwegian Labour Party politician; Norwegian Minister of Culture (1996-1997); Member of Norwegian Parliament (1986-1989); Oslo City Councilwoman in 2015, until her death from complications of myelofibrosis
- November 5, 1973 – Gráinne Seoige born, Irish journalist, news anchor, television presenter and Irish language advocate; she is the only television presenter to have worked on Irish telelvison’s TG4, TV3, RTÉ One and RTÉ2.She has also read the inaugural news bulletins on three separate channels—TG4, TV3, and Sky News Ireland, and also appeared on the BBC One series That’s Britain
- November 5, 1982 – Leah Culver born, computer programmer and co-author of OAuth and oEmbed API specifications; co-founder of the micro-blogging site Pownce in 2007, acquired by Six Apart in 2008; also co-founder of real time chat site Convore in 2011, which pivoted into Grove, a chat service for workgroups, and was sold to Revolution Systems in 2012. After working as an engineer at Dropbox, she co-founded Breaker with Erik Berlin in 2016, where she is currently CTO
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- November 6, 1856 – Scenes of Clerical Life, three short stories by the author later known as George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans), is submitted for publication
- November 6, 1884 – May Brahe born, Australian composer, best known for songs and ballads, including “Bless This House” (lyrics by Helen Taylor)
- November 6, 1933 – Else Ackermann born, German physician and pharmacologist who became an East German politician in the Christian Democratic Union party. While chair of the local branch of the party in her hometown of Neuenhagan, she drafted a report on the power relationships between the citizen and the state, and in 1988 she presented what came to be known as the “Neuenhagen Letter,” to the national party, a significant precursor of the 1989 changes which led to the ending, in the early summer of 1990, of the one-party dictatorship, followed by German reunification later that same year
- November 6, 1955 – Catherine Asaro born; science fiction and fantasy author; former ballet and jazz dancer; PhD in chemical physics from Harvard who privately teaches math, physics, and chemistry to gifted kids; advocate for getting more women in STEM fields; best known for her series Saga of the Skolian Empire
- November 6, 2015 – A Mormon spokesman confirmed that the new policy of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints declares those in a same-sex marriage are considered apostates, and children living in a same-sex household may not be blessed as babies, or baptized until they are 18, and then only if they disavow same-sex cohabitation and marriage, stop living within the household and request to join the church
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- November 7, 1878 – Lise Meitner born in Austria-Hungary, Austrian-Swedish physicist; co-leader with Otto Hahn of the scientists who discovered the nuclear fission of uranium when it absorbed an extra neutron, a process which was the basis of the WWII nuclear weapons developed by the U.S. at Los Alamos
- November 7, 1917 – Helen Suzman born, South African politician and anti-Apartheid activist; Member of the South African Parliament for Houghton (1953-1989), where she used every opportunity to speak out against discriminatory legislation and to defend the right of freedom of expression for all South Africans. She was a founding member of the Progressive Party in 1959, and its sole representative in parliament for the next 16 years. She visited prisons to inspect living conditions of prisoners, including those on Robben Island, and met with Nelson Mandela several times. Her reports improved prison conditions for several ANC prisoners, and she used her parliamentary privilege to evade government censorship, and pass information about the worst abuses of apartheid to the media. She was frequently reviled and derided as a Jew and as a woman by other members of Parliament and by Prime Minister P.W. Botha, both in Parliament and in the government-controlled press. Suzman was once accused by a minister of asking questions in parliament that embarrassed South Africa, to which she replied: “It is not my questions that embarrass South Africa; it is your answers.” The UN honored her with its Human Rights Award in 1978, and the Medallion of Heroism in 1980, and she was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize
- November 7, 1921 – ‘Lisa Ben’ born as Edythe Eyde, American LGBT rights activist, writer and singer-songwriter; while working as a secretary at RKO Studios in Los Angeles, she became the founder and publisher of the lesbian magazine Vice Versa in 1947, but was forced to stop publishing when she lost her job at RKO in 1948, and her new position left her no opportunity to type the magazine articles at work. In the 1950s, she was a contributor to the Daughters of Bilitis magazine, The Ladder. Noted for her song, “Cruisin’ Down the Boulevard,” one of the first recorded lesbian songs. Inducted into the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Hall of Fame in 2010
- November 7, 1943 – Joni Mitchell born, Canadian singer-songwriter; winner of nine Grammy awards; regarded as one of the most important and influential women recording artists of the late 20th century
- November 7, 1943 – Silvia Cartwright born, New Zealand jurist; served on the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, and played a major role in the drafting of the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women; presided over the 1988 inquiry into issues relating to treatment of cervical cancer at Auckland’s National Women’s Hospital, known as the Cartwright Inquiry; first woman Chief District Court Judge (1989-1993) and first woman appointed to New Zealand’s High Court (1993); the second woman appointed as New Zealand’s Governor-General (2001-2006); she was one of four women appointed, out of 16 international judges, by Cambodia’s Supreme Council of Magistracy to the Trial Chamber of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal investing war crimes and human rights abuses (2006-2014); appointed to the UN Human Rights Council investigation into war crimes and human rights abuses in Sri Lanka in 2014
- November 7, 1947 – Rebecca Eaton born, American television and film producer; best known as the executive producer since 1985 of the PBS Masterpiece series; her productions have been awarded 62 Primetime Emmy Awards, 16 Peabody Awards, 6 Golden Globes, and 2 Academy Award nominations
- November 7, 1953 – Maire Aunaste born, Estonian journalist, television presenter and politician; news reporter for Aktuaalne kaamera (Current camera), the Estonian language daily news program; member of the Riigikogu (Estonian Parliament) since 2015; currently on the Social Affairs Committee and Study Committee to Solve the Demographic Crisis
- November 7, 1989 – ‘Nadya Tolokno’ born Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Russian conceptual artist and political activist, member of the Anarchist Feminist group Pussy Riot
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- November 8, 1878 – Dorothea Bate born, English paleontologist and pioneer in archaeozoology; studied fossils of extinct mammals to understand how and why giant and dwarf forms evolved; first known woman to be employed as a scientist by the Natural History Museum in London; made many expeditions to Mediterranean Islands and elsewhere to find prehistoric fauna remains
- November 8, 1900 – Margaret Mitchell born, American author of Gone With the Wind
- November 8, 1922 – Thea Drell Hodge born, American computer scientist, a pioneer in the field who mentored many women students; founded the Minnesota chapter of the Association for Women in Computing, and mentored countless young women in her field; member of the Association for Computing Machinery, which inducted her into their hall of fame in 2004
- November 8, 1947 – Margaret Rhea Seddon born, American physician, researcher on the effects of radiation therapy on nutrition in cancer patients, and NASA astronaut (1979-1997); she was the seventh woman in space, and flew on missions in 1985, 1991 and 1993; currently assistant Chief Medical Officer of the Vanderbilt Medical Group in Nashville, Tennessee
- November 8, 1978 – Emma Lewell-Black born, British Labour politician, Member of Parliament for South Shields since 2013, the first women to represent South Shields; member of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee since 2013, and of the Work and Pensions Select Committee since 2015
- November 8, 1983 – Danielle Evans born, American fiction writer; her first short story collection won the 2011 PEN/Robert Bingham Prize
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- November 9, 1723 – Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia born, became Princess Abbess of Quedlinburg (1756-1787); noted as a musical patron, and a collector of music whose library included over 600 volumes of works by Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frideric Handel, Georg Philipp Telemann, and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, among many others; she was herself a composer of chamber works, but many of them have been lost
- November 9, 1891 – Louisa E. Rhine born, American doctor of botany, who was initially a research fellow in plant physiology, but became the foremost researcher of spontaneous psychic experiences. After she and her husband, J.B. Rhine, trained with Dr. Walter Franklin Prince of the Boston Society (1926-1927), then moved to Durham, North Carolina, where her husband helped launch Duke University’s parapsychology department. She stopped working in 1928 to raise their adopted son, and was co-founder of the Durham Nursery School, the first nursery school in South Carolina for children of working women, and also helped form the Durham Chapter of the League of Women Voters. In 1948, she returned to academic research, where she took over reading and answering letters from the public about the Duke parapsychology lab, at first part-time, but later she began full-time work researching and analyzing thousands of experiences from letters sent to her, and laying the groundwork for their classification
- November 9, 1928 – Anne Sexton born, American poet; 1967 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her book Live or Die; co-authored four children’s books with poet Maxine Kumin
- November 9, 1960 – Sara Franklin born, American anthropologist, who combines ethnographic methods and kinship theory with fieldwork on IVF, cloning, embryology and stem cell research, as well as leading major research studies addressing the cultural and social dimensions of new reproductive and genetic technologies; among the first researchers to analyse the forms of social change associated with the introduction of new reproductive technologies in the 1980s
- November 9, 1961 – Jill Dando born, English journalist, newsreader, and presenter of the BBC programme Crimewatch; after working as a print journalist (1980-1985), she worked in regional BBC television (1985-1988), then moved to national television news on BBC1 and BBC2 (1986-1995) before moving to presenting Crimewatch in 1995, and also did episodes of other programmes. She was shot to death on April 26, 1999, outside her home. A local man was convicted and imprisoned for the murder, but was later acquitted after an appeal and retrial. The case remains open
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- November 10, 1884 – Zofia Nałkowska born, Polish novelist, dramatist, and essayist; executive member of the Polish Academy of Literature (1933-1939); known for Medaliony (Medallions), a collection of eight stories published in Warsaw in 1946 describing the fate of people who survived the Nazi persecution, based on materials she collected while working at the Central Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland
- November 10, 1899 – Kate Seredy born in Hungary, Hungarian-American children’s book author and illustrator; she wrote most of her books in English, which was not her first language; noted for The Good Master, a 1936 Newbery Honor Book; The White Stag, winner of the 1938 Newbery Medal and the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award; and The Singing Tree, a 1940 Newbery Honor Book
- November 10, 1908 – Noemi Gerstein born, Argentine sculptor, illustrator and plastic artist; won the 1982 Konex Foundation Platinum Award, for non-figurative sculpture
- November 10, 1911 – California Proposition 4, the most elaborate campaign ever mounted for woman suffrage, succeeds by just 3,587 votes
- November 10, 1950 – Debra Hill born, American film producer and screenwriter whose best-known films are in the horror and action genres; The Fog, Halloween II and Halloween III
- November 10, 1958 – Deborah Cameron born, British linguist, professor in Language and Communication at Worcester College, Oxford; her interests are in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, and the relationship of language to gender and sexuality; author of Verbal hygiene, and The Myth of Mars And Venus: Do Men and Women Really Speak Different Languages?
- November 10, 1960 – Maeve Sherlock born, Baroness Sherlock, British Labour Party Life Peer; Member of the House of Lords since 2010; Commissioner of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (2007-2010); Chief Executive of the Refugee Council (2003-2006)
- November 10, 1971 – Holly Black born, American author and editor; noted for the children’s fantasy series, The Spiderwick Chronicles
- November 10, 1971 – Nikki Karimi born, Iranian director, screenwriter and actress; best known for writing and directing To Have or Not to Have, and as director of One Night, screened at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, Un Certain Regard section
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- November 11, 1744 – Abigail Adams born, politically influential First Lady (1789–1797), early advocate for women’s rights; her husband was often away from home due to his political work, so Abigail, who was largely self-educated, oversaw the household and the farm, and raised their four children, while maintaining a lively lifelong correspondence with her husband on the political issues of the day. In addition to women’s rights, she was an advocate for educating girls, and the abolition of slavery
- November 11, 1891 – Grunya Sukhareva born, Soviet child psychiatrist; noted for being the first to publish a detailed description of autistic symptoms in 1925. It was published in German in 1926, and Sula Wolff translated it into English in 1996; Sukhareva founded a Faculty of Pediatric Psychiatry in the Central Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education. In 1938, she led a clinic specializing in childhood psychosis under Russia’s SFSR Ministry of Agriculture and Food
- November 11, 1896 – Shirley Graham Du Bois born, African-American author, playwright, composer, and civil and human rights activist; director of the Chicago Negro Unit of the Federal Theatre Project of the WPA; member of Sojourners for Truth and Justice, which worked for global women’s liberation, and the American Communist Party. She married her second husband, W.E.B. Dubois, in 1951, and they emigrated to Ghana, where he died in 1963. After a coup d’état in 1967, she left, and later became a citizen of Tanzania. Noted for There Was Once a Slave, about Frederick Douglass, and Zulu Heart
- November 11, 1914 – Daisy Gatson Bates born, American civil rights activist, publisher, and journalist. She and her husband founded the Arkansas State Press, a statewide weekly newspaper in 1941, which ran civil rights stories on its front page, highlighted achievements of black Arkansans, covered all the Black Arkansas social news, and reported on violations of the Supreme Court’s desegregation rulings. In 1952, she was elected president of the Arkansas Conference of NAACP branches. Because of their newspaper, and because she was the spokesperson for the Arkansas NAACP, during the Little Rock Integration Crisis of 1957, white advertisers withdrew their ads from the paper, and the KKK twice burned large crosses on their front lawn. She became an adviser to the Little Rock Nine, who were harassed by mobs and kept out of Little Rock High School by the Arkansas National Guard, called out by Governor Orval Faubus. According to U.S. Attorney for the Eastern Arkansas District Orso Cobb, “Mrs. Daisy Bates and her charges arrived at the school. . . admitted through one of the less conspicuous entrances. Seconds later, a white female student climbed through a first-story window and yelled that she wasn’t going to school with ‘niggers’. . . television cameras showed a crowd that was calm. None was visibly armed in any way. . . . some eight agitators known to the Federal Bureau of Investigation . . . were there for no good purpose but to create as much chaos as possible. They had no children in the school; they were provocateurs . . . “Let’s get those niggers out of there.”… The agitators first tried to bully the police into defecting. … Tempers began to rise … The leaders of each assault on the police lines were collared and put into police wagons and taken to jail. More than forty persons were taken into custody. No one in the crowd tried to intervene to prevent the arrests and removal of the troublemakers. No one in the crowd had clubs or weapons of any kind. These two points convinced me that 98 percent of the people there were not part of an organized mob.” “The perseverance of Mrs. Bates and the Little Rock Nine during these turbulent years sent a strong message throughout the South that desegregation worked and the tradition of racial segregation under “Jim Crow” would no longer be tolerated in the United States of America.”
- November 11, 1926 – Maria Teresa de Filippis born, Italian woman pioneer in auto racing, the first woman to race in Formula One. She was active in 1958-1959, participating in 5 World Championship Grands Prix
- November 11, 1930 – Mildred Dresselhaus born, American physicist and academic, known for work on graphite and carbon nanotubes; first woman Institute Professor and professor emerita of physics and electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She won numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Science, the Enrico Fermi Award and the Vannevar Bush Award
- November 11, 1954 – Mary Gaitskill born, American novelist, essayist and short story writer; noted for short story collection, Bad Behavior; novels, Two Girls, Fat and Thin and Because They Wanted To; and her essay in Harper’s magazine, “On Not Being a Victim,” about rape
- November 11, 2013 – Malala Yousafzai’s memoir, I Am Malala, is an international best-seller, but it has been banned private schools in Pakistan, her home country. School administrators complain that the book degrades Islam and that its teenage author acted like a “propaganda tool of the West”
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- November 12, 1606 – Jeanne Mance born, French Canadian settler and nurse who was one of the founders of Montreal. After taking patients into her home (1642-1645), she received a contribution that enabled her to found the city’s first hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal in 1645. She returned to France twice to seek financial support for the hospital, and recruited three sisters of the Religieuses hospitalières de Saint-Joseph to provide care for the patients so she could devote more time to directing the operation of the hospital
- November 12, 1651 – Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz born, Hieronymite nun of New Spain, self-taught scholar, feminist philosopher, composer and poet; called “The Mexican Phoenix”; Her criticism of misogyny and the hypocrisy of men led to her condemnation by the Bishop of Puebla, and in 1694 she was forced to sell her collection of books and focus on charity towards the poor; she died the next year, from the plague while treating her sister nuns
- November 12, 1815 – Elizabeth Cady Stanton born, American suffragist, abolitionist, and leading figure of the women’s rights movement; She wrote the Declaration of Sentiments for the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention which launched the woman suffrage campaign; president of the National Woman Suffrage Association (1892-1900), but she was also an advocate for women’s parental and custody rights, property, wage and employment rights, divorce and birth control; author/editor of the controversial The Woman’s Bible, a challenge to the traditional view that women should be subservient to men
- November 12, 1941 – Carol Gluck born, American historian, author and authority on Japan; books including Rekishi de kangaeru (Thinking with History) and Showa: the Japan of Hirohito; a founding member of the Committee on Global Thought
- November 12, 1962 – Naomi Wolf born, American author, journalist and feminist; noted for The End of America
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- November 13, 1862 – Mary Kingsley born, English ethnographer, scientific writer and explorer who had training as a nurse; her travels in West Africa, beginning with a four month journey in 1893 from Sierra Leone to Angola, and followed by an 1894-1895 trip which began in Nigeria, where she met the missionary Mary Slessor, then canoeing up the Ogooué River in Gabon, and climbing Mount Cameroon, before returning to England for an extensive lecture tour. Her lectures and the publication of her books, Travels in West Africa, and West African Studies, did much to shape the popular perception in Britain of Africans
- November 13, 1955 – Whoopi Goldberg born Caryn Johnson, American comedian, actress, author and television host; one of the few entertainers to have won an Emmy, a Grammy, a Tony and and Oscar; advocate for human rights and LGBT rights, and against the use of children in armed conflicts
- November 13, 1959 – Caroline Goodall born, English screenwriter and actress; has performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre; noted for her screenplays for The Bay of Silence and Dreams of Leaving
- November 13, 1961 – Kim Polese born, American technology executive; Chair of CrowdSmart Inc, a technology-based seed stage investment company, and Chair of ClearStreet Inc, which develops products and tools to help reduce employer and employee spending on healthcare; co-founder and CEO of Marimba with the creators of the Java programming language; recipient of the 2010 Innovator Award from the National Center for Women & Information Technology
- November 13, 1967 – Bonnie Ntshalintshali born, South African Artist, noted for ceramic works and paintings; she had polio as a child, so her mother encouraged her to develop her artistic skills to earn a living; won the Corobrik National Ceramic Award in 1988; died from an AIDS-related illness in 1999
- November 13, 1974 – Karen Silkwood, a technician and union activist at the Kerr-McGee Cimarron plutonium plant near Crescent, Oklahoma, is killed in a suspicious car crash
- November 13, 1981 – Rivkah born as Rivkah Greulich, American cartoonist and graphic novelist; noted for her teen series Steady Beat
- November 13, 2014 – Over a three year period, five New Orleans police detectives charged with investigating sex crimes dismissed 840 out of 1,290 sex crime calls as “miscellaneous” and did no follow-up, according to a city inspector general report; in New York, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance announced Wednesday that he would dedicate $35 million for helping U.S. prosecutors clear a backlog, testing tens of thousands of rape kits
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- November 14, 1920 – Mary Greyeyes born, a member of the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation and the first First Nations woman to join the Canadian Armed Forces, serving in the Canadian Women’s Army Corps (1942-1946); a publicity picture of her in uniform brought her much attention; at the end WWII, Indigenous people who served in the Canadian military were offered the choice to give up their treaty rights and Indian status in return for the right to vote, and she was urged to visit a polling station and have her picture taken voting, but she pointed out the unfairness of the voting laws and refused. First Nations people didn’t get the right to vote in Canada until 1960
- November 14, 1921 – Ea Jansen born in Estonia, Finno-Ugric historian; most of her research focused on the national awakening of Estonia, and she made substantial contributions to the knowledge of this period; taught at the Tallinn Pedagogical University
- November 14, 1934 – Catherine McGuinness born, Irish jurist and politician; represented the University of Dublin in the Seanad Éireann (Ireland’s Senate – 1979-1981 and 1983-1987); first woman Judge of the Circuit Court (1994-1996); Judge of the High Court (1996-2000); Judge of the Supreme Court (2000-2006); President of the Law Reform Commission (2005-2011); Member of the Council of State since 2012
- November 14, 1944 – Karen Armstrong born, British author and commentator; a former Roman Catholic religious sister; noted for her books on comparative religion and as a writer and presenter for BBC Channel Four; A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam
- November 14, 1950 – Sarah Radclyffe born, British film producer; co-founder of Working Title Films; noted as executive producer on Caravaggio, Wish You Were Here, A World Apart, Les Misérables (1998), and The War Zone
- November 14, 1956 – Babette Babich born, American philosopher; known for studies of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Anders, Adorno, and Hölderlin, and work in aesthetics, including philosophy of music, life-size bronzes in antiquity (Greek sculpture), and continental philosophy, especially the philosophy of science and technology. Babich has also made substantive contributions to scholarly discussion of the role of politics in institutional philosophy (the analytic-continental divide) as well as gender in the academy
- November 14, 1956 – Valerie Jarrett born, American public servant in the Obama Administration; Director of the U.S. Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs (2009-2017), and Senior Advisor to the President (2009-2017); previously served in various positions in the mayor’s office in Chicago (1987-2005) and was a member of the Chicago Stock Exchange (2000-2007) and as its chair (2004-2007)
- November 14, 1967 – The Columbian Congress declares the “Day of the Columbia Woman” in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the death of ‘La Pola’, Policarpa Salavarrieta, a Neogranadine seamstress-turned-spy for the revolutionary forces fighting against the Spanish who was caught and executed
- November 14, 1972 – Lara Giddings born, Australian Labor politician; Premier of Tasmania (2011-2014); Deputy Premier of Tasmania (2008-2011); Treasurer of Tasmania (2010-2014); Member of the Tasmanian Parliament (1996-1998 and 2002-2018)
- November 14, 1983 – The British government announces that 96 Tomahawk cruise missiles, part of a planned NATO deployment, have arrived at Greenham Common air base; thousands of protesting women who have camped outside the gate stage a lie-in
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- November 15, 1916 – Nita Barrow born, Barbadian nurse, humanitarian activist and politician; first woman Governor-General of Barbados (1990-1995)
- November 15, 1954 – Emma Dent Coad born, British Labour politician; Member of Parliament for Kensington since 2017
- November 15, 1958 – Lesley Laird born, Scottish politician; Deputy Leader of the Scottish Labour Party since June 2018; Member of the Scottish Parliament for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath since 2017
- November 15, 1962 – Judy Gold born, American comedian, television writer and producer; won 2 Daytime Emmys for her writing and producing on The Rosie O’Donnell Show
- November 15, 1967 – Cynthia Breazeal born, computer scientist known for her pioneering work in social robotics and human-robot interaction; Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
- November 15, 2013 – Janet Yellen, President Obama’s nominee to replace Ben Bernanke as Federal Reserve chair, testifies before the Senate Banking Committee
- November 15, 2018 — Protests erupted in Belfast, Cork, Dublin and Limerick, with hundreds of women and men calling for a national reckoning over how sexual assault cases are handled, after Irish defense lawyer Elizabeth O’Connell in her closing argument asked the jury to consider a 17-year-old’s underwear. “Does the evidence out-rule the possibility that she was attracted to the defendant and was open to meeting someone and being with someone? You have to look at the way she was dressed. She was wearing a thong with a lace front . . .” Prosecutors said the teen was raped in a muddy ally by the accused, a 27-year-old man who was unanimously acquitted by a jury of eight men and four women — #ThisIsNotConsent
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