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 July 1 through through July 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 will post a little later, so be sure to go there next and catch up on the latest dispatches from the frontlines.
Early July’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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- July 1, 1725 – Rhoda Delaval born, Lady Astley by marriage, English portrait painter; died at age 32 just after the birth of her fourth child in three years
- July 1, 1804 – George Sand, born as Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin; French novelist and playwright who scandalized French society by smoking, wearing men’s clothing, and having a series of very public affairs, her lovers included composer Frédéric Chopin and author Alfred de Musset; remembered for her novels, including La Petite Fadette (Little Fadette), Consuelo, and La Mare au Diable (The Devil’s Pool)
- July 1, 1826 – Ellen Clark Sargent born, American woman suffragist and good friend of Susan B. Anthony, who moved across the country to California in 1852, and established the Nevada County Women’s Suffrage Association, the first in the state. Her husband, Aaron Sargent, elected as a U.S. Senator (R-CA), was the first Senator to speak for women’s suffrage on the Senate floor, and introduced in 1878 a bill with the twenty-nine words that would become the 19th Amendment, a bill which would be introduced every Senate session, unsuccessfully, for the next 40 years. Ellen Clark Sargent worked tirelessly for women’s rights as a founder of the Century Club which helped elect women to local school boards, and serving on the boards of the California Equal Suffrage Association and the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Like Susan B. Anthony, she also attempted to vote after passage of the 14th Amendment but was turned away, then she sued to reclaim her property taxes based on “taxation without representation”– she lost the case and every appeal, but it brought attention to the suffrage cause. She died just days before October 10, 1911, when women in California won the vote, On the day of her memorial service, for the first time in the state, flags were flown at half mast for a woman
- July 1, 1850 – Florence Earle Coates born, American poet whose work appeared regularly in many of the major periodicals of her day; several poems were also set to music by composers Amy Beach, Clayton Johns and Charles Gilbert Spross. Matthew Arnold met her on a lecture tour of America, and encouraged her to write, becoming a long-time friend and mentor. In 1886, she was a founder of the Contemporary Club in Philadelphia, and was twice president of Philadelphia’s Browning Society (1895-1903 and 1907-1908); published several poetry collections, including Lyrics of Life and The Unconquered Air
- July 1, 1858 – Alice Barber Stephens born, American painter, engraver and illustrator
- July 1, 1858 – Velma Caldwell Melville born, American editor, poet, sketch and serial writer; she was editor of the Home Circle and Youths’ Department of The Practical Farmer, and of the Hearth and Home Department of The Wisconsin Farmer; noted for her intensely patriotic writing, and for her book, White Dandy, Or Master And I; A Horse’s Story, a variation on the more famous Black Beauty, which also swayed public opinion on protecting animals
- July 1, 1873 – Alice Guy-Blaché born, French filmmaker, pioneer in early cinema narrative fiction films, the use of sound syncing, color tinting, interracial casting, and special effects. One of the earliest female directors, she was also the first woman to found and run her own studio, The Solax Company (1910); her film A Fool and His Money, made in 1912, had an all-black cast
- July 1, 1876 – Susan Glaspell born, American playwright whose play, Alison’s House, won the 1931 Pulitzer Prize for Drama; also an actress, director, novelist, biographer, poet, and journalist; co-founder of the Provincetown Playhouse, where Eugene O’Neill’s early plays were first produced; also noted for her plays Trifles, and Inheritors
- July 1, 1885 – Dorothea Mackellar born, Australian author and poet; best-known for poem “My Country”
- July 1, 1887 – Amber Reeves born in New Zealand, British author, socialist and feminist; chose getting an education at Cambridge over a Court Presentation as a debutante; wrote four novels and four works of non-fiction with socialist and feminist themes; member of the Labour Party, and editor of Womens Leader, a party publication
- July 1, 1895 – Lucy Howorth born, attorney, U.S. magistrate, legislator, suffragist, held positions in federal agencies during the 1930s and 1940s
- July 1, 1901 – Irna Phillips born, American scriptwriter, casting agent and actress, dubbed the “Queen of the Soaps” for creating, producing and writing several of the first daytime radio and television soap operas, including radio’s Woman in White, and TV’s Guiding Light, As the World Turns and Another World; she was a mentor to Agnes Nixon, another pioneer in daytime television
- July 1, 1903 – Amy Johnson born, early British woman pilot, set numerous long-distance records, including first woman to fly alone from England to Australia in six days; member of the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) during WWII, she was killed in 1941 during an ATA ferry flight crash in bad weather
- July 1, 1904 – Mary Steichen Calderone born, physician and sex educator, Medical Director of Planned Parenthood (1953-1964), principal founder and president of Sex Information and Education Council of the U.S. (1964)
- July 1, 1906 – Estée Lauder, originally Josephine Esther Mentzer, born cosmetics pioneer, co-founder Estée Lauder Companies, originated ‘free gift with purchase,’ became one of the richest self-made women in the world, recipient of Presidential Medal of Freedom. As a philanthropist, funded playgrounds in New York’s Central Park and contributed to the restoration of Versailles in the 1970s
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July 1, 1930 – Carol Chomsky born, American linguist and education specialist, noted for her studies of language acquisition in children; married to Noam Chomsky
- July 1, 1934 – Jean Marsh born, British actor and writer; co-creator and star of the BBC television series Upstairs, Downstairs (1971-1975)
- July 1, 1941 – Twyla Tharp born, American dancer-choreographer
- July 1, 1946 – Mireya Moscoso born, first woman elected President of Panama, presiding during the handover of the Panama Canal by the U.S.
- July 1, 1955 – Lisa Scottoline born, American lawyer and author of legal thrillers and nonfiction
- July 1, 1981 – Nell Dunn’s play, Steaming, with an all-female cast, premieres in London
- July 1, 2014 – Vice Admiral Michelle J. Howard promoted to 4-star Admiral, the first woman to achieve the U.S. Navy’s highest rank
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- July 2, 1504 – Elizabeth de Vere born, Countess of Derby; took over as Lord of Mann (1612-1627) from her husband, the first woman to rule as the Isle of Mann’s head of state
- July 2, 1865 – Lily Braun born, German feminist writer, a leader in German feminist movement, worked for feminist newspaper Die Frauenbewegung (The Women’s Movement); advocate for women’s economic freedom and for the abolition of legal marriage; author of Die Frauen und die Politik, Lebenssucher
- July 2, 1876 – Harriet Brooks born, first Canadian woman nuclear physicist and first female to work in the new field of nuclear physics, at Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge England with J.J. Thomson (1901-03). She taught at Barnard College (1904-1906), but the Dean demanded her resignation when she became engaged. She ended the engagement, but resigned anyway, saying “I think it is a duty I owe to my profession and to my sex to show that a woman has a right to the practice of her profession and cannot be condemned to abandon it merely because she marries. I cannot conceive how women’s colleges, inviting and encouraging women to enter professions can be justly founded or maintained denying such a principle.” After that, she worked for a year with Marie Curie in Paris before returning to Montreal
- July 2, 1879 – Genevieve Cline born, lawyer, judge and club woman, first woman named to the federal judiciary, advocate for consumer protection, women’s rights and suffrage
- July 2, 1896 – Lydia Mei born, Estonian painter, known for watercolors and still-life paintings
- July 2, 1900 – Sophie Harris born, English theatre set and costume designer, a co-founder of the Motley Theatre Design Group, which frequently worked on productions for John Gielgud, director Michel Saint-Denis (founder of the London Theatre Studio), and Lawrence Olivier, as well as the Sadler’s Wells Theatre, English National Opera and Royal Court Theatre; Harris also designed costumes for films, including A Taste of Honey, The Innocents, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, and This Sporting Life
- July 2, 1902 – Germaine Thyssens-Valentin born, Dutch classical pianist, received her training and spent much of her life in France; she made her debut at the age of eight
- July 2, 1916 – Zélia Gattai born, Brazilian photographer, memoirist, author of novels and children’s books; member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters; honored with the 1980 Prêmio Dante Alighieri (Dante Alighieri Award)
- July 2, 1918 – Frances Reed Elliot becomes the first African American woman in the American Red Cross Nursing Service
- July 2, 1919 – Jean Craighead George born, prolific children’s and YA author, 1973 Newbery Award for Julie of the Wolves; also wrote two guides to cooking with wild foods and an autobiography
- July 2, 1922 – Eleanor Leacock born, cultural anthropologist, studied Native North Americans, and issues of gender and class, racism, and poverty. Her essay"Interpreting the Origins of Gender Inequality: Conceptual and Historical Problems" has been very influential
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July 2, 1923 – Wisława Szymborska born, Polish poet, essayist and translator, ”, recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature, described as the “Mozart of Poetry” and a woman who “mixed elegance of language with the fury of Beethoven. . .” These poetry collections have been translated into English: View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems, and Monologue of a Dog
- July 2, 1937 – Amelia Earhart’s plane goes missing over the Pacific Ocean near Howland Island
- July 2, 1943 – Ivi Eenmaa born, Estonian librarian and politician; head of the Estonian National Library (1993-1997); the first woman mayor of Tallinn (1997-1999); mayor of Võru (2005-2007); elected to the Riigikogu (Estonian Parliament) in 2007
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July 2, 1947 – Ann Taylor born, Baroness Taylor of Bolton, British Labour politician; Minister of State for International Defence and Security (2008-2010); Chief Whip in the Commons and Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury (1998-2001); first woman Leader of the House of Commons and Lord President of the Privy Council; Member of Parliament (1974-2005); became a Life Peer in 2005
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July 2, 1950 – Dame Lynne Brindley born, Master of Pembroke College, Oxford, since 2013; first woman Chief Executive of the British Library, the UK’s national library (2000-2012); Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts
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July 2, 1960 – Maria Lourdes Sereno born, Filipina lawyer and judge; appointed by Benigno Aquino III as de facto Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the Philippines (2012-2018), the first woman and second youngest person to head the judiciary. She was removed from office in an 8-6 decision over a quo warranto petition (a demand to show one’s right to authority) voiding her appointment, believed to be politically motivated as she has been a vocal critic of Rodrigo Duterte
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July 2, 1964 – President Lyndon Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act; Title VII prohibits sex discrimination in employment
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July 2, 1971 – Evelyn Lau born to Chinese-Canadian parents from Hong Kong, Canadian poet and writer; her parents demanded she study to become a doctor, she felt the pressure was unbearable, ran away from home, and was homeless for over two years, which she chronicled in Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid; she has since published short stories and essays, six collections of poetry, and a novel, Other Women
- July 2, 1979 – The ill-conceived Susan B. Anthony dollar is released by the U.S. Mint
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- July 3, 1790 – Nicolas, marquis de Condorcet publishes “De l’admission des femmes au droit de cite” (For the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship) in the Journal de la Société de 1789, in which he strongly advocates women’s suffrage in the new Republic as well as enlargement of basic political and social rights to include women; Condorcet identifies gender as a social construction based on perceived differences in sex and rejects biological determinism as an explanation of gender relations in society. He denounces patriarchal norms of oppression, present at every institutional level, which continuously subjugate and marginalize women, identifying education as crucial to the emancipation of individuals: ″I believe that all other differences between men and women are simply the result of education.″
- July 3, 1860 – Charlotte Perkins Gilman born, American feminist leader, sociologist, author, poet and social reform lecturer; best known for her subtly terrifying short-story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” but her non-fiction works, such as Women and Economics, and The Home: Its Work and Influence, contributed much to feminist thought; Gilman single-handedly wrote and edited her magazine, The Forerunner (1909-1916), where many of her ideas first appeared, producing 86 issues, each 28 pages long, for nearly 1,500 subscribers
- July 3,1881 – Natalia Goncharova born, Russian avant-garde painter, costume and set designer, illustrator and writer; co-founder of artistic groups Jack of Diamonds and Donkey’s Tail
- July 3, 1901 – Ruth Crawford Seeger born, American composer and folk music expert
- July 3, 1908 – M.F.K. Fisher born as Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, influential American food writer, author of 26 books, and a translation of The Physiology of Taste by Brillat-Savarin; founder of the Napa Valley Wine Library; Serve It Forth, Consider the Oyster, and How to Cook a Wolf are among her most popular works
- July 3, 1928 – Evelyn Ward-Thomas born, British historical and spy thriller novelist who used the more masculine-sounding pen name ‘Evelyn Anthony’ because of the difficulty for women authors in getting published; best known for Far Flies the Eagle, All the Queen’s Men and The Tamarind Seed
- July 3, 1929 – Joanne King Herring born, American socialite, and political activist; used her political associations with President of Pakistan Zia-ul-Haq (1977-1988) and U.S. Representative Charlie Wilson (D-TX 1973-1997) to sway the U.S. government to train and arm the Mujahideen resistance fighters to fight in the Soviet war in Afghanistan, codename ‘Operation Cyclone,’ which inspired the book Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History, and the 2007 movie Charlie Wilson’s War
- July 3, 1938 – Jean Aitchison born, English linguist and academic; Professor of Language and Communication in the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford; noted for Socio-historical linguistics, and the relationship of language to the mind and to media
- July 3, 1939 – Brigette Fassbaender born, German mezzo-soprano and opera director at the Staatstheater Braunschweig and the Tiroler Landestheater in Innsbruck
- July 3, 1940 – Fontella Bass born, singer-songwriter; “Rescue Me” (1965)
- July 3, 1941 – Gloria Allred born, women’s and civil rights lawyer, noted for taking high-profile and controversial cases, television and radio commentator
- July 3, 1964 – Joanne Harris born, English author; best known for her novel Chocolat, which won the 2000 Creative Freedom Award and the 2001 Whittaker Gold Award
- July 3, 1967 – Katy Sloan Clark born, British Labour politician; political secretary of Labour since 2015; Member of Parliament for North Ayrshire and Arran (2005-2015)
- July 3, 1983 – Dorota Masłowska born, Polish writer, playwright, columnist and journalist; author of Wojna polsko-ruska pod flagą biało-czerwoną (Polish-Russian War under White-Red Flag) and Paw królowej (The Queen’s Peacock), which won the 2006 NIKE Literary Award
- July 3, 1984 – U.S. Supreme Court rules Jaycees may be compelled by a state’s anti-discrimination law to accept women as full members in Roberts v. U.S. Jaycees
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- July 4, 68 BC – Salonia Matidia born; her maternal uncle was Trajan, who thought highly of her intelligence and listened to her opinions; her daughter married Hadrian, who became Roman Emperor after Trajan; when Matidia died in 119, Hadrian delivered her funeral oration, deified her, and granted her a temple and altar in Rome itself, making her the first divinized Roman woman with a full-scale temple of her own, not shared with her husband
- July 4, 1868 – Henrietta Swan Leavitt born, American astronomer; discoverer of relationship between luminosity and variables associated with Cepheid stars, which allows astronomers to measure the distance between Earth and other galaxies
- July 4, 1876 – Suffragists crash the Centennial Celebration in Independence Hall to present the Vice President with the “Declaration of the Rights of Women” written by Matilda Joselyn Gage
- July 4, 1898 – Pilar Barbosa de Rosario born, Puerto Rican historian, educator and political activist; daughter of Puerto Rican Senator Jose Barbosa, often called “the Father of the Puerto Rican Statehood Movement.” She got her Doctorate in History at Clark University in Massachusetts, and returned home to become the first woman hired as a professor at University of Puerto Rico’s College of Liberal Arts; in 1929, she established the Department of History and Social Sciences, and was its director until 1943, but continued to teach until her retirement in 1967; she was very active in the statehood movement, following in her father’s footsteps, and served as a political advisor to members of the New Progressive Party, including Resident Commissioner and Governor Luis Fortuño (2009-2013); named by the Legislative Assembly as Official Historian of Puerto Rice in 1993; she lived to be 98 years old
- July 4, 1898 – Gertrude Lawrence born, British actress, singer and dancer, international theatrical and film star; during WWI, she traveled under grueling conditions to entertain troops in both Europe and the Pacific
- July 4, 1900 – Belinda Boyd Dann, Australian, born as Quinlyn Warrakoo to a Nykina mother and an Irish cattle station manager; one of the “stolen generations,” taken away from her mother when she was 8 years old, and sent to Beagle Bay Mission in Western Australia, where her name was changed to Belinda Boyd. She married Mathias Dann in 1918. Although she remembered Warrakoo was her name, she did not know who she was or where she came from. After one of her grandsons told her story and her original name to a friend connected to the Nykina people, in 2007 Warrakoo met her 97-year-old brother for the first time, just weeks before he died, speaking the Nykina language again after almost a century. She died a few months later at age 107
- July 4, 1900 – Nellie Mae Rowe born, Africa-American self-taught artist, now considered an important folk artist; her home and yard were her primary canvas, which she referred to as her ‘playhouse’; it was dismantled and torn down after her death in 1982, replaced by a hotel, which has a plaque identifying the site’s previous inhabitant
- July 4, 1903 – Dorothy Levitt becomes first English woman to compete in a 'motor race.' Also holder of world's first water speed record and women's world land speed record. Popularized motoring for women by teaching Queen Alexandra and the Royal Princesses how to drive. Author of The Woman and the Car: A Chatty Little Handbook for All Women Who Motor or Want to Motor, in the book, she said women should "carry a little hand-mirror in a convenient place when driving" so they may "hold the mirror aloft from time to time in order to see behind while driving in traffic," introducing rear view mirrors before manufacturers added them in 1914
- July 4, 1910 – “America the Beautiful” is published; lyrics from the poem “America” (title changed from “Pikes Peak” for publication) by Katherine Lee Bates, and music by Samuel A. Ward, originally written for a hymn called “O Mother Dear, Jerusalem” published in 1895
- July 4, 1910 – Gloria Stuart born, American film and stage actress, visual artist, political and environmental activist; she made her first movie appearance in 1932, and played her last role in 2004, with a gap from 1945 to 1975, in which she left acting to become an artist working in several mediums, including painting, making fine prints and miniature books, and shaping Bonsai. In 1975, she started doing small parts on television and in movies, then was cast in 1996 as the older Rose in Titianic, five days after her 86th birthday. She was nominated for the 1997 Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. Stuart campaigned for an actors’ union, and was a founding member of the Screen Actors Guild. She helped form the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League in 1936, and was co-founder with Dorothy Parker of the League to Support the Spanish War Orphans. Became a long-time environmentalist: “I belong to every organization that has to do with saving the environment.” She lived to the age of 100
- July 4, 1916 – Sisters Adelina and Augusta Van Buren begin a successful transcontinental motorcycle tour. Addie and Gussie leave Brooklyn NY, and will arrive in Los Angeles CA, on September 8, 1916. America was on the brink of entering WWI, and they proved that women could ride as well as men, so could serve as military dispatch riders, freeing up men for other tasks. They also hoped women serving in a military capacity would remove a primary argument against giving women the vote. They defied convention in dress, wearing military-style leggings and leather riding breeches
- July 4, 1918 – Esther and Pauline Friedman born, twin sisters better known as Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren, American syndicated advice columnists
- July 4, 1934 – Yvonne B. Miller born, American Democratic politician, civil rights activist and teacher; first African-American woman to serve in both Virginia state legislative houses, and first woman chair of a Virginia Senate committee; she died while in office, as the longest-serving woman in the Virginia Senate at that time
- July 4, 1936 – Zdzisława Donat born, Polish coloratura soprano, notable as the Queen of Night in Die Zauberflöte, Professor Emeritus at Frédéric Chopin University of Music
- July 4, 1936 – Queen Sonja of Norway born as a commoner; noted as a humanitarian activist, involved in Princess Märtha Louise’s Fund, which provides assistance to disabled children in Norway. Active in large-scale initiatives to raise funds for international refugees. Served as Vice President (1987-1990) of the Norwegian Red Cross, traveling with delegations to Botswana and Zimbabwe in 1989. Since 2006, Queen Sonja’s School Award, honors schools demonstrating “excellence in efforts to promote inclusion and equality”
- July 4, 1951 – Kathleen Kennedy Townsend born, American attorney, Democratic politician; since 2010, chair of American Bridge, a non-profit which raises funds for Democratic candidates and causes; Lieutenant Governor of Maryland (1995-2003)
- July 4, 1958 – Vera Leth born, Greenlandic civil servant, County Council Ombudsman for the Parliament of Greenland since 1997
- July 4, 1963 – Sonia Pierre born, Dominican human rights advocate, worked to end Antihaitianismo, discrimination against persons of Haitian origin in the Dominican Republic; recipient of Amnesty International’s 2003 Human Rights Ginetta Sagan Fund Award and the 2006 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award; she grew up in a migrant workers’ camp, one of 12 children, whose father was an undocumented worker from Haiti. Her mother came with a temporary work permit in 1957. Pierre’s nationality was disputed by the Junta Central Electoral, which said her birth certificate was forged. She began her political activism at age 14, organizing a five-day protest by sugar cane workers for better living conditions and wages. She was arrested, but the workers’ demands were met. She became director of the Movement for Dominican Women of Haitian Descent (MUDHA). In 2005, she petitioned the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to hear the case of two ethnic Haitian children who were denied Dominican birth certificates, Yean and Bosico v. Dominican Republic, “upheld human rights laws prohibiting racial discrimination in access to nationality and citizenship.” The court also ordered the Dominican government to provide the birth certificates, but the Dominican Supreme Court later ruled that “Haitian workers were considered ‘in transit,’ and that their children were therefore not entitled to citizenship.”
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- July 5, 1755 – Sarah Siddons born, British actress, the most famous and admired English actress of her generation, “The Queen of Drury Lane” (London’s theatre district) known for her portrayal of tragic roles, especially Lady Macbeth
- July 5, 1857 – Clara Zetkin born, German Marxist theorist and activist, women’s rights advocate. Went into exile in Paris when Bismarck banned socialist activity in Germany, and was part of organizing the Socialist International in 1889; she was a key organizer of the 1910 International Socialist Women’s Conference in Copenhagen, which endorsed the idea of an international day of action for women’s suffrage, now International Women’s Day; the Clara Zetkin Medal honors women active in women’s rights
- July 5, 1879 – Wanda Landowska born, Polish harpsichordist, first person to record Bach’s Goldberg Variations on the harpsichord, instrumental in reviving the harpsichord’s popularity in the 20th century
- July 5, 1888 – Louise Freeland Jenkins born, American astronomer; compiles a catalogue of stars within 10 parsecs of the sun; editor, 3rd edition of the Yale Bright Star Catalogue; research on trigonometric parallax of nearby stars, and variable stars
- July 5, 1899– Anna Arnold Hedgeman born, civil rights activist and educator, first black woman in the cabinet of the New York mayor (1954-1958); YWCA executive director; executive secretary of National Council for a Permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC); Assistant Dean of Women at Howard University; helped to plan the 1963 March on Washington
- July 5, 1905 – Madeleine Sylvain-Bouchereau born, pioneering Haitian sociologist, a principle founder of the Ligue Féminine d’Action Sociale (Women’s Social Action League), the first feminist organization in Haiti, and a regular contributor to La Voix des Femmes, the organization’s journal. After graduating in law at the University of Haiti (1933), she studied education and sociology at the University of Puerto Rico (1936-1938), then got her doctorate in sociology at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania (1941). Published Haïti et ses femmes: Une étude d’évolution culturelle (Haiti and its Women: A Study of Cultural Evolution) in 1957. Taught at Haiti’s Ethnology Institute (1941-1945), then at Fisk University. Haitian delegate to the Third Inter-American Conference on Education in 1937, and part of a UN effort to arrange social services for Polish political prisoners in 1944; Advisor to the government of Togo on community development (1966-1968)
- July 5, 1914 – Annie Fischer born, Hungarian pianist and composer
- July 5, 1920 – Mary Louise Hancock born, American politician and activist, New Hampshire state senator and the state’s first woman Planning Director, who later worked with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Known as the “Grande Dame” of New Hampshire politics; she was the recipient of Robert Frost and Susan B. Anthony Awards; One of her many obituaries said, “. . . "More than a Senator and a glass-ceiling shattering woman, she was the embodiment of what it meant to be a New Hampshire Democrat.” July 5th is “Mary Louse Hancock Day” in New Hampshire
- July 5, 1922 – Dutch women vote for the first time
- July 5, 1944 – Leni Björklund born, Swedish politician, the first woman Minister of Defence for Sweden (2002-2006)
- July 5, 1953 – Caryn Linda Navy born, American mathematician and computer scientist. Blind from retinopathy of prematurity; known for her work in set-theoretic topology and Braille technology; graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), honored with the AMITA Senior Academic Award from the Association of MIT Alumnae
- July 5, 1958 – Veronica Guerin born, Irish journalist; switched careers in 1990 from accountancy, public relations and political campaign agent, to be a reporter for the Sunday Business Post and Sunday Tribune; in 1994, she began writing about crime for the Sunday Independent, using her accounting skills to trace money from illegal drug transactions. She became a widely-read columnist, and was often threatened, including shots fired into her home in 1994, and a gunman who rang her doorbell, then as she opened the door, pushed his way in and shot her in the leg. She was beaten by drug kingpin John Gilligan when she confronted him about his lavish lifestyle with no source of income. Guerin continued her investigations, and was honored with the 1995 International Press Freedom Award. In June, 1996, John Traynor, one of Gilligan’s lieutenants, was seeking a High Court order to prevent her from publishing a book about his involvement in organized crime, and she was scheduled to speak at a Freedom Forum conference in London on the topic of “Dying to Tell the Truth: Journalists at Risk.” Two days before she was to speak at the conference, Guerin was shot and killed while stopped at a traffic light by two men on a motorcycle, causing national outrage in Ireland. The investigation into her death identified the killers as members of Gilligan’s drug organization. Labour unions and other organizations across Ireland called for a moment of silence in her memory, and Taoiseach (Ireland’s head of state) John Bruton attended her funeral. Within a week of her murder, the Oireachtas (Irish parliament), enacted the Proceeds of Crime Act 1996 and the Criminal Assets Bureau Act 1996, so assets bought with money obtained through crime could be seized by the government
- July 5, 2000 – President Bill Clinton signs two protocols of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child: one to prevent involvement of children in armed conflict as combatants, and another against the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography
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- July 6, 1387 – Blanche I of the House of Évreux born, Queen regnant of Navarre, ruling from the 1425 death of her father King Charles III until her own death in 1441
- July 6, 1803 – Sophia Willard Dana Ripley born, Transcendentalist, co-founder with husband George of Brook Farm, an educator who employed child-centered methods of teaching
- July 6, 1900 – Frederica Sagor Maas born as the youngest daughter of Russian immigrants, American screenwriter, memoirist and author; became a story editor at Universal Pictures’ New York office in 1918, and was head of the department by 1923. In 1924, she moved to Hollywood, and went to work for MGM writing scripts, usually assigned to work with other writers, but her co-authors often took credit for her work, and her contract was not renewed. After that, she and her husband Ernest Maas sometimes worked together and pitched scripts to Fox and Paramount, with hit-or-miss success. After they lost most of their money in the 1929 stock market crash, they moved back to New York, then back out to Hollywood, but their indifferent success combined with some of their best story ideas suddenly re-appearing with other names as the authors, made them change careers. She became an insurance broker, and he was a story editor and ghost writer until he died in 1986. Urged by film historian Kevin Brownlow, she published her autobiography, The Shocking Miss Pilgrim: A Writer in Early Hollywood, at age 99, then lived to be 111
- July 6, 1907 – Frida Kahlo born, Mexican surrealist painter, known for self-portraits, considered emblematic of national and indigenous tradition
- July 6, 1912 – Molly Yard born in China to Methodist missionaries, American feminist and social activist; after graduating from Swarthmore College, she worked on several Democratic candidates’ political campaigns, including Helen Gahagan Douglas’ run for the U.S. Senate against Richard Nixon, who won by smearing Gahagan Douglas as a commie pinko. She later led the Western Pennsylvania presidential campaigns for John F. Kennedy and George McGovern. Co-founder of the liberal lobbying organization Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). Joined the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1974, and was on its national staff by 1978, lobbying and fundraising for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) ratification campaign in Washington. She was a senior staff member on the NOW Political Action Committee (1978-1984), then NOW’s political director (1985-1987), defeating anti-choice referendums in Arkansas, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Oregon. Yard became NOW president (1987- 1991), and was one of the banner-carriers for the March for Women’s Lives in 1989, which drew 600,000 marchers to Washington. Honored with the Feminist Majority Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award
- July 6, 1926 – Dorothy E. Smith born, Canadian sociologist, noted for work on women’s studies and feminist theory, family relationships, education and methodology; developed institutional ethnology, a study of the social relations of actual people in everyday life (she described it as a “sociology for, not of the people”), and her contributions to the standpoint theory, the idea that hierarchies create ignorance at the top about social problems which those at the bottom understand from direct experience. Her research questioned the methods and theories of sociology up the 1970s, which she found were based on the male-dominated social structure, and overlooked women and minorities
- July 6, 1929 – Hélène Carrère d’Encausse born, French political historian of Georgian ancestry, specializing in Russian history; elected to seat 14 of the Académie française in 1990, and as the Académie’s Perpetual Secretary in 1999; member of the European Parliament (1994-1999) for the right wing Conservative party RPR. Awarded the Polish Lomonosov Gold Medal in 2008 and Grand Cross with Star of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland in 2011
- July 6, 1937 – Bessie Emery Head, writer born in South Africa to a wealthy white South African woman and a black servant when interracial relationships were illegal; her mother’s family claimed their daughter was mentally ill, and sent her away to give birth without the neighbors knowing. After her mother killed herself, she was raised by foster parents and later in a mission orphanage. Qualifying as a teacher, she taught briefly, then became a journalist for The Golden City Post and Drum magazine (1958-1959). She joined the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) in 1960, and married Harold Head in 1961. In 1964, she left South Africa with her son, and sought asylum in the Bechuanaland Protectorate (which is now Botswana); she settled in Serowe, where she would set most of her novels and short stories; after 15 years, she became a Botswana citizen. Noted for her novels When Rains Cloud Gather, Maru, and A Question of Power. She died from hepatitis at age 48, just as she was starting to be recognized as a writer
- July 6, 1942 – Anne Frank and her family go into hiding in the “Secret Annexe” above her father’s office in an Amsterdam warehouse
- July 6, 1957 – Althea Gibson is the first African American woman tennis player to win a Wimbledon title in women’s tennis singles
- July 6, 1960 – Maria Wasiak born, Polish politician and civil servant; a founding member of the Democratic Union, then headed the regional branch of the Freedom Union party (1995-1997); deputy-voivode of the Radom Voivodeship (governmental administrative division in Radom); President of Polskie Koleje Państwowe (PKP – the Polish State Railways – 2011-2012); Minister of Infrastucture and Development of Poland (2014-2015)
- July 6, 1976 – Ioana Dumitriu born in Romania, Romanian-American mathematician and academic; her research work includes the theory of random matrices, numerical analysis, scientific computing, and game theory. She was the first woman to become a Putnam Fellow, for making one of the top five scores at the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, and won the Elizabeth Lowell Putnam Award as the top woman in the contest in 1995, 1996, and 1997, a record she alone held for the next ten years, until it was equaled by Alison Miller. In 2012, she was one of the inaugural fellows of the American Mathematical Society
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- July 7, 1456 – Joan d’Arc is acquitted in a new trial, 25 years too late: she was executed on May 30, 1431
- July 7, 1851 – Lillien J. Martin born, American psychologist author of over 12 books, including Salvaging Old Age, and Sweeping the Cobwebs; graduated from Vassar in 1880; refused admission to the University of Bonn because of her gender, she studied at the University of Göttingen (1894-1898). Martin taught psychology at Stanford University (1899-1916). In 1913, the University of Bonn awarded her an honorary doctorate. After she left Stanford, Martin became a consulting psychologist and psychopathologist in San Francisco, where she was the head of the world’s first mental health clinic specifically for elderly people and non-handicap children. She was president of the California Society for Mental Hygiene
- July 7, 1852 – Vera Nikolayevna Figner born, Russian revolutionary, doctor’s assistant; participant in assassination plot against Alexander II, tired and sentenced to death, but her sentence was commuted to Siberian penal servitude; wrote Memories of a Revolutionist
- July 7, 1861 – Nettie Stevens born, an early American geneticist; described the XY chromosome system in 1905, correcting and adding to the findings of Edmund Beecher Wilson, showing the significance of Y chromosomes in sex determination. After he made further experiments which confirmed her results, Wilson updated and reissued his earlier 1905 paper, with the new information, and acknowledging her discoveries, but many textbooks only credited Wilson and Thomas Hunt Morgan (her graduate course instructor, who won the Nobel Prize for his contributions to chromosome research) with her discoveries. Wilson and Morgan were invited to speak at a conference to present their theories in 1906, but Stevens was not asked. She published about 40 papers before she died of breast cancer at age 50 in 1912. Thomas Hunt Morgan wrote an extensive obituary for the journal Science, “Her single-mindedness and devotion, combined with keen powers of observation; her thoughtfulness and patience, united to a well-balanced judgment, account, in part, for her remarkable accomplishment”
- July 7, 1867 – Charlotte Anita Whitney, American social worker, Communist Labor Party organizer, pacifist and suffragist; defendant in the 1920 ‘Criminal Syndicalism’ trial, Whitney v. California, charged with being a member of an organization that was illegal under California law because of its association with the international Communist movement – Whitney’s conviction was upheld by the Supreme Court, but the “clear and present danger” criteria in the opinion written by Justice Louis Brandeis was a landmark in free speech jurisprudence. Whitney was later pardoned by the Governor of California, and the Court explicitly overturned Whitney v. California in its Brandenburg v. Ohio ruling in 1969
- July 7, 1904 – Simone “Simca” Beck born, French cooking instructor and cookbook author who collaborated with Julia Child on Mastering the Art of French Cooking
- July 7, 1905 – Marie-Louise Dubreil-Jacotin born, French mathematician; the first woman to become a full professor of mathematics in France; expert in fluid dynamics and abstract algebra; author of textbooks on lattice theory and abstract algebra, and a history, Portraits of Women Mathematicians
- July 7, 1908 – Harriette Simpson Arnow born, writer and educator, The Dollmaker, writer with Federal Writer’s Project of the WPA (1934-39)
- July 7, 1910 – Doris McCarthy born, Canadian painter of landscapes and Arctic icebergs
- July 7, 1915 – Margaret Walker born, African American poet and novelist, her poem “For My People” (1942) won Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, author of the novel Jubilee
- July 7, 1924 – Natalia Bekhtereva born, Russian neuroscientist and psychologist; founding director of the Institute for Human Brain, a branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, did studies measuring the impulse activity of human neurons
- July 7, 1929 – Helen Rodríguez Trías born, pediatrician, educator, Puerto Rican nationalist, and women’s rights activist. She joined the student faction of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party at the University of Puerto Rico (BA 1957, Medical Degree 1960). During her residency at University Hospital in San Juan, she established the first center for newborn care in Puerto Rico, where the death rate for newborns decreased 50 % within the first three years. She was the first Hispanic president of the American Public Health Association, a founding member of the Women’s Caucus of the American Public Health Association, and the recipient of the Presidential Citizen’s Medal. She is credited with helping to expand the range of public health services for women and children in minority and low-income populations around the world
- July 7, 1942 – Heinrich Himmler, in a private meeting with Richard Glücks, SS chief of Concentration Camps Inspectorate, and Gynecologist Karl Clauberg, outlines a program of experimentation on Jewish women prisoners at Auschwitz to sterilize them with massive radiation or direct uterine injections
- July 7, 1945 – Adele Goldberg born, American computer scientist, leading member of team that developed the programming language Smalltalk-80; also a developer of various object-oriented programming concepts and graphically based user interfaces; president of the Association for Computing Machinery (1984-1986), and co-recipient of the 1987 ACM Software Systems Award
- July 7, 1948 – Kay Langdon, Wilma Marchal, Edna Young, Frances Devaney, Doris Robertson, and Ruth Flora became the first six enlisted women sworn into the regular U.S. Navy, after the signing of the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act in June. Prior the act, U.S. women could only serve in the armed forces during times of war
- July 7, 1972 – Susan Lynn Roley and Joanne E. Pierce, the first two women FBI special agents, are sworn in (The first woman agent was Emma Hotchkiss Jentzer, who was hired by the FBI’s predecessor, the Bureau of Investigation, in 1911) J. Edgar Hoover, first and longest-serving director of the FBI, had initiated a policy of not hiring women, and none were hired from 1924 until after his death in office May 2, 1972
- July 7, 1976 – The first women cadets are enrolled at West Point
- July 7, 1980 – Sharia Law is instituted in Iran; women judges are removed first from office, but by early 1982, the entire pre-Revolutionary judiciary was purged, replaced by “Revolutionary Tribunals” set up in every town, but overseen by inexperienced and often incompetent judges,with no appeals. In 1982, a regular court system was reinstated, but with judges trained in Islamic law, and the Revolutionary Tribunals now handling cases of “national Security” and “anti-revolutionary” crimes
- July 7, 1981 – Sandra Day O’Connor nominated as first woman on U.S. Supreme Court
- July 7, 1983 – Samantha Smith, 12-year-old American, flies to the Soviet Union at the invitation of Secretary General Yuri Andropov after she writes a letter to him. She travels as a Goodwill Ambassador making a plea for peace. In 1985, she is killed in a plane crash
- July 7, 1986 – Anahit “Ana” Kasparian born, American political pundit, university lecturer and author; Raw Story columnist; best known for co-hosting and producing the online news show The Young Turks, and as a host on The Point at the TYT Network; outspoken critic of private and for-profit prisons; advocate for campaign finance reform, affordable housing, public education and free speech
- July 7, 1992 – New York Court of Appeals overturns a conviction of two women for exposing their breasts in public; ruling women have the same right as men to go topless in public
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- July 8, 1593 – Artemisia Gentileschi born, notable Italian painter, known for painting strong or suffering women from myth; first woman member of the Accademia di Arte del Disegno in Florence
- July 8, 1821 – Maria White Lowell born, American poet and abolitionist, advocate for temperance and women’s rights
- July 8, 1844 – Mary Bailey Lincoln born, American pioneer in domestic science, author of Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cook Book: What to Do and What Not to Do in Cooking
- July 8, 1862 – Ella Reeve “Mother” Bloor born, labor organizer and activist in American socialist and communist movements
- July 8, 1867 – Käthe Kollwitz born, German painter, printmaker and sculptor, often depicting the tragedy of war, poverty, and hunger
- July 8, 1902 – Gwendolyn Bennett born, Harlem Renaissance author and artist, wrote “The Ebony Flute” column for journal “Opportunity,” co-founder of “Fire!!” a literary journal
- July 8, 1911 – “Two Gun” Nan Aspinwall, rodeo cowgirl, arrives in New York City, after riding across the U.S. on horseback; she departed from San Francisco CA on September 1, 1910
- July 8, 1918 – Julie Pirie born, British spy for MI5, who infiltrated the Communist Party in the 1950s, initially as a typist, but worked her way into the inner circles, working directly for under party secretary John Gollan. She was never found out, and retired from the party in 1978, with a pension which the party paid until her death in 2008; her next assignment for MI5 was to collect information on the activities of the Provisional IRA, often posing as a tourist. She finally left active operations in the 1990s, but lectured to groups of MI5 and police trainees
- July 8, 1926 – Elisabeth Kubler-Ross born, Swiss psychiatrist and author; theory of five stages of grief; author of On Death and Dying; inducted into the American National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2007
- July 8, 1929 – Shirley Ann Grau born, American author; 1965 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Keepers of the House
- July 8, 1934 – Raquel Correa born, Chilean journalist, mostly worked for newspaper El Mercurio de Santiago,awarded Chile’s National Journalism Award in 1991
- July 8, 1945 – Micheline Calmy-Rey born, Swiss Social Democratic politician; President of Switzerland (2007 and 2011); Vice President of Switzerland (2006 and 2010); Minister of Foreign Affairs and Member of the Swiss Federal Council (2003-2011)
- July 8, 1948 – Vietta M. Bates becomes first enlisted woman sworn into the regular U.S. Army, and Esther Blake is the first woman to enlist in the regular U.S. Air Force
- July 8, 1948 – Ruby Sales born, African American social activist; at age 17, she participated in the Selma to Montgomery marches of 1965. Sales was also part of the voter registration drive, and arrested with others for picketing a whites-only store, which was ignoring the Civil Rights Act of 1964; after her release, she and friends went to buy sodas at a nearby store. Sales was confronted by a “special county deputy” with a shot gun; fellow marcher and activist Jonathan Daniels, a white Episcopalian studying for the priesthood, pushed her out of the way, shot to death in her place. Sales was so traumatized by his murder she could barely speak for seven months. In spite of death threats made against her and her family, she testified at the trail. The deputy was acquitted by an all-white-male jury, resulting in legal challenges and a reform of jury selection procedures. She enrolled at the same school that Jonathan Daniels had attended, and worked in Washington DC as a human rights advocate. She founded the SpiritHouse Project, a non-profit inner-city mission dedicated to Daniels’ memory
- July 8, 1952 – Marianne Williamson born, teacher, author and lecturer on the intersection between spirituality and politics; founder of Project Angel Food, a meals-on wheels program serving homebound people with AIDS; co-founder of the Peace Alliance, a grassroots campaign supporting legislation to establish a U.S Department of Peace; member of the Board of RESULTS, a non-profit working to end poverty; author of A Woman’s Worth, and Tears to Triumph: The Spiritual Journey from Suffering to Enlightenment
- July 8, 1976 – Dame Ellen MacArthur born, English solo long distance sailor; broke the work record for fastest solo circumnavigation of the globe in 2005; retired from professional sailing in 2010, and launched the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a non-profit working on creating a circular economy, to minimize waste and increase recycling, repair and repurposing, creating a sustainable economy with the least impact on the environment
- July 8, 1981 – U.S. Senate confirms Sandra Day O’Connor to Supreme Court; the vote is 99-0
- July 8, 1982 – Sophia Bush born, American actress and activist, fundraising for Fuck Cancer, Run for the Gulf and Global Green Gulf Relief; campaigned for Barak Obama and other Democrats in Texas during the 2008 election; supporter of gay rights, women’s rights, and protecting the environment; one of the performers who told stories in a 2016 Human Rights Campaign memorial video about the people who were killed in the Orlando Pulse massacre
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- July 9, 1764 – Ann Radcliffe, English novelist, pioneer of the Gothic novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Romance of the Forest
- July 9, 1811 – Fanny Fern born, American author and columnist for the New York Ledger
- July 9, 1858 – Kaikhusrau Jahan born, notable progressive Begum of Bhopal (ruled 1901-1926), improved her people’s living conditions, especially in education and public health
- July 9, 1894 – Dorothy Thompson born, journalist and radio broadcaster, first American journalist expelled from Nazi Germany in 1934, Time magazine in 1939 called her second most influential woman in America after Eleanor Roosevelt
- July 9, 1917 – Krystyna Chlond Dańko born, Polish orphan in Otwock who saved the lives of her Jewish friend Lusia Kokszko, and Lusia’s family during the WWII Nazi occupation of Poland, smuggling two of them out of Otwock to Warsaw; she hid the rest of the family, and brought them food and clothing; in 1998, she was awarded the title Righteous among the Nations by Yad Vashem. Most of the rest of the Jews of Otwock perished in the Triblinka death camp, or were summarily shot when the Otwock ghetto was liquidated in September 1942
- July 9, 1926 – Mathilde Krim born in Italy, American medical researcher, part of the team that developed a prenatal method to determine fetal gender; one of the earliest researchers to recognize the severity of the threat of AIDS, she was the founding chair of AIDS Medical Foundation which became amfAR, an association for AIDS research; she was honored in 2000 with Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the 2003 Jefferson Award for Greatest Public Service Benefiting the Disadvantaged
- July 9, 1930 – Janice Lourie born, American computer scientist and graphic artist; pioneer in CAD/Cam for the textile industry, best known for inventing software tools that facilitate textile production from artist to manufacturer; a founding member of the Camerata of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; played the tenor shawm and psaltery from the museum collection
- July 9, 1931 – Sylvia A. Bacon born, American Associate Judge of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia (1970-1991), appointed by Nixon; worked for the U.S. Department of Justice (1956-1970) and served under Ramsey Clark, helping to draft legislation for D.C. court reform
- July 9, 1935 – Mercedes Sosa born, Argentine singer and activist, won several Grammy Awards and a posthumous Latin Grammy for Bet Folk Album; UNICEF ambassador
- July 9, 1936 – June Jordan born, poet, educator and activist, columnist for The Progressive, Achievement Award for International Reporting from the National Association of Black Journalists; librettist for the musical I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky
- July 9, 1944 – Judith M. Brown born in India, British historian, specialist in modern South Asia, and an Anglican priest; Beit Professor of Commonwealth History, Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford (1990-2011); Research Fellow, Director of Studies in History, Girton College, Cambridge (1968-1971); author of Gandhi and Civil Disobedience: The Mahatma in Indian Politics 1928-1934
- July 9, 1953 – Margie Gillis born, Canadian modern dance choreographer and solo dancer whose repertoire includes over 100 pieces; in 1987, she became the first modern dance artist to be awarded the Order of Canada; in 2008, the inaugural recipient of the Stella Adler MAD Spirit Award for her involvement in social causes
- July 9, 1970 – Masami Tsuda born, Japanese shōjo manga artist; noted for Kare Kano: His and Hers Circumstances, and the series Chotto Edo Made
- July 9, 1978 – In hot, humid weather, 100,000 supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment (E.R.A.) march in Washington DC , with purple and white banners, colors honoring the National Woman’s Suffrage Party of Alice Paul, who turned immediately after the long-awaited success of the campaign for women’s right to vote, to making women’s legal equality a Constitutional amendment. The march supports bill H.J.R. 638, to extend E.R.A.’s deadline of March 22, 1979. Only eight votes by state senators in three states had kept the E.R.A. from being ratified by March 1, 1977
- July 9, 2013 – Michelle Knight, Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus, who were kidnapped, held captive in a Cleveland house and raped for over ten years, release a video. In their first public statement since their escape, they thank the many supporters for “such an outpouring of love and kindness.” The Courage Fund, established to help them, had already raised over $1 million
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- July 10, 1553 – Lady Jane Grey takes the throne of England. “The Nine Days Queen” ruled from July 10 to July 19, 1553
- July 10, 1724 – Eva Ekeblad born, Swedish countess, salon host, agronomist and scientist; known for discovering a method to make flour and alcohol from potatoes, transforming potatoes from an exotic food grown only in the greenhouses of the aristocracy to a staple food of Sweden, significantly reducing the country’s incidence of famine; first woman to become a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1748
- July 10, 1875 – Mary McLeod Bethune, educator, founder of National Council of Negro Women, served as Minority Affairs Advisor to Franklin Delano Roosevelt
- July 10, 1882 – Ima Hogg born, cruelly named by her then-Texas governor father, became a philanthropist, patron of the arts, supporter of mental health and child welfare organizations, and savior of many historic structures
- July 10, 1884 – Harriet Wiseman Elliott born, American educator and public official, Dean of Women at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro; Chair of the Woman’s Division of the U.S. War Finance Committee, Deputy Director of the U.S. Office of Price Administration, and United States delegate to UNESCO
- July 10, 1891 – Edith Hinkley Quimby born, American medical researcher and physicist, pioneer in nuclear medicine; developed diagnostic and therapeutic applications of X-rays, and instituted protections for both the technicians and the patients from overexposure to radioactive materials, assuring the use of the lowest dose possible to achieve results; in 1940, she was the first woman honored with the Janeway Medal by the American Radium Society; awarded the 1941 Gold Medal of the Radiological Society of North America; she was also one of the first members of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine
- July 10, 1896 – Thérèse Casgrain born, Canadian feminist, reformer and politician, Senator in Quebec, leader in the women’s suffrage movement and founder of the Provincial Franchise Committee; hosted the radio program Fémina in the 1930s
- July 10, 1905 – Mildred Wirt Benson born, American journalist and author of 23 of the 30 original Nancy Drew mysteries (series written by various authors but all books published under “Carolyn Keene”)
- July 10, 1910 – Mary Bunting born, microbiologst, president of Radcliffe College (1959-72); oversaw the integration of Radcliffe into Harvard, founded Bunting Institute at Radcliffe, helped women return to careers after family obligations, first woman on the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission
- July 10, 1916 – Judith Jasmin born, Canadian journalist and radio host, founding member of the Mouvement laïque de langue française (“The Francophone Secular Movement”)
- July 10, 1921 – Eunice Kennedy Shriver born, American activist, founder of Camp Shriver which evolved into the Special Olympics, long time advocate for children with disabilities, recipient of many awards and honors including the Presidential Medal of Freedom
- July 10, 1922 – Jean Kerr born, American author and playwright, wrote bestseller Please Don’t Eat the Daisies
- July 10, 1929 – Winnie Ewing, Scottish lawyer and politician; served as a Member of the UK Parliament, the European Parliament, and the Scottish Parliament
- July 10, 1931 – Alice Munro born, Canadian author, known for her short stories, recipient of many awards and honors including Canada’s Governor General’s Award, the Man Booker International Prize and the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature
- July 10, 1931 – Julian May born, American scifi, fantasy and children’s author who used several pen names, including Ian Thorne; best known for her two series, Saga of Pliocene Exile and Galactic Milieu
- July 10, 1933 – Jan DeGaetani born, versatile mezzo-soprano and outstanding teacher at Aspen Music Festival and Eastman School in Rochester
- July 10, 1943 – Inonge Mbikusita-Lewanika born, Zambian politician and diplomat; Republic of Zambia Ambassador to the U.S. (2003-2008); Zambian special envoy to the African Union (2001-2003); Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD) Member of Zambia’ Parliament (1991-2001); UNICEF regional advisor for Africa (?-1991)
- July 10, 1959 – Ellen Kuras born, American cinematographer and filmmaker; one of the first women members of the American Society of Cinematographers; known for her cinematography work on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and her directorial debut, The Betrayal, which won a Primetime Emmy Award for Non-Fiction Filmmaking, and was nominated for a 2009 Oscar for Best Documentary Feature
- July 10, 1967 – Gillian Tett born, British journalist and finance columnist for the Financial Times, one of the first pundits to warn that a financial crisis loomed in 2007
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- July 11, 1850 – Annie Armstrong born, American lay Southern Baptist leader; co-founder and first correspondent secretary (de facto leader: 1888-1906) of the Women’s Missionary Union, forged in spite of fierce opposition by male Southern Baptist leaders; she worked tirelessly as an advocate for missionaries, especially those in the U.S. and Canada, telling their stories and raising funds to support their missions. Her fundraising efforts were so successful that the Southern Baptist annual Easter offering is named the ‘Annie Armstrong Easter Offering for North American Missions.’ It has accumulated over $1.1 billion to date
- July 11, 1851 – Millie and Christine McCoy, conjoined twins, born into slavery in North Carolina; after the Civil War, the twins received an education, learning five languages, dancing and music; they were featured as “The Two-Headed Nightingale” with the Barnum Circus until their deaths.
- July 11, 1871 – Edith Rickert born, American author and medieval scholar, notable for her works on Chaucer
- July 11, 1881 – Isabel Martin Lewis born, American astronomer; first woman hired by the U.S. Naval Observatory as an assistant astronomer; elected in 1918 as a member of the American Astronomical Society; after the birth of her son, she worked part-time at the observatory, but wrote three books and countless articles to popularize astronomy and earth science, including a monthly column for thirty years in the American Nature Association’s Nature Magazine (not the same as the journal Nature). She returned to full-time work when her husband died in 1927, and promoted to Assistant Scientist, then in 1930 to the rank of Astronomer; specialized in eclipses, contributing a faster and more accurate method of determining where an eclipse would be visible, and the moon’s occultations. She went on solar eclipse expeditions to Russia in 1936 and to Peru in 1937, and retired from the Naval Observatory in 1951, but continued to write articles for newspapers and magazines; she had of one the longest and most successful careers of any woman astronomer in the first half of the 20th century
- July 11, 1881 – Erna Mohr born, German zoologist, long associated with the Zoological Museum Hamburg, where she started as a volunteer (1914-1934), then later became department head of the Fish Biology Department (1934-1936), then the Department of Higher Vertebrates (1936-1946), and finally Curator of the Vertebrate Department (1946-1968?); made contributions to ichthyology and mammalogy, producing over 400 publications; first woman to be elected as an Honorary Member of the American Society of Mammalogists
- July 11, 1906 – Grace Mae Brown, a worker in the factory of the Gillette Skirt Company in Cortland NY, who became pregnant during an affair with the owner’s nephew, Chester Gillette, is taken by him to Big Moose Lake in the Adirondacks, where he registers at the hotel under a false name, takes her out on the lake in a rowboat, then strikes her on the head so she falls out of the boat and drowns. His trial and conviction attract national attention, inspiring Theodore Dreiser write An American Tragedy, in which he uses some direct quotes from Grace Brown’s love letters
- July 11, 1918 – Venetia Burney born, English girl credited by Clyde Tombaugh with suggesting Pluto as the name for his 1930 discovery when she was 11 years old. Asteroid 6235 Burney, and Burney Crater on Pluto are named for her. In 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft, the first to visit Pluto, carried an instrument named the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter in her honour
- July 11, 1928 – Andrea Veneracion born, Filipina choirmaster, founder of the Philippine Madrigal Singers in 1963, which won major awards in international competition; founding choirmaster and first conductor of Asian Institute for Liturgy and Music Chorale; honored as 1999 Philippine National Artist for Music
- July 11, 1938 – Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, historian, author of A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard based on her diary, 1785–1812 and Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History
- July 11, 1944 – Patricia Polacco born, American author and illustrator of over 60 books, mostly for children; Thank You, Mr. Falker, The Lemonade Club, Mr. Lincoln’s Way and The Mermaid’s Purse
- July 11, 1946 – Sarah Blaffer Hrdy born, primatologist and author, studied evolution of primate social behavior, especially the role of females and mothers in evolution; The Woman Who Never Evolved, Mothers and Others
- July 11, 1960 – To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is published
- July 11, 1967 – Jhumpa Lahiri born in London, daughter of Bengali Indian emigrants, moved to the U.S. when she was two; American author and professor of creative writing at Princeton; her debut short story collection Interpreter of Maladies won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
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- July 12, 1879 – Margherita Piazzola Beloch born, Italian mathematician; fields of study were algebraic geometry, algebraic topology and photogrammetry; notable for work on birational transformations in space
- July 12, 1895 – Kirsten Flagstad born, Norwegian soprano, ranked among the greatest singers of the 20thcentury, known for her roles Wagner operas
- July 12, 1918 – Doris Grumbach born, American novelist, biographer, essayist and co-owner of Wayward Books bookstore in Sargentville ME; literary editor of The New Republic (1972-1974); noted for novels about women, many with gay and lesbian themes, and her two memoirs: Coming into the End Zone, and Extra Innings
- July 12, 1920 – Beah Richards born, actor, author, poet, playwright, and civil rights activist, known for performances in original Broadway productions of The Miracle Worker and A Raisin in the Sun, win a Tony Award, 2 Emmy Awards and nominated for Best Supporting Actress Academy Award
- July 12, 1941 – Delia Ephron born, American novelist, playwright and screenwriter; co-author with her sister Nora of the play Love, Loss and What I Wore, which ran Off-Broadway for over 2 ½ years; her screenplays include The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and You’ve Got Mail
- July 12, 1951 – Joan B. Bauer born, American young adult author; noted for Squashed, and Rules of the Road, which was a Newbery Honor Book and won the Golden Kite Award
- July 12, 1952 – Irina Bokova born, Bulgarian politician and diplomat; first woman Director-General of UNESCO (2009-2017); Bulgarian Minister of Foreign Affairs (acting/1996-1997), Bulgarian Ambassador to France and Monaco; advocate for gender equality, improved education and preventing funding for terrorism, especially by enforcing protection of intellectual goods; firm opponent of racism and anti-Semitism; led UNESCO’s activities on Holocaust remembrance
- July 12, 1962 – Joanna Shields born in America, Baroness Shields, British Conservative politician and Group CEO of BenevolentAi; Life peer in the House of Lords since 2014; Prime Minister’s Special Representative on Internet Safety (2016-2018); Under-Secretary of State Minister for Internet Safety & Security (2015-2017)
- July 12, 1969 – Chantal Jouanno born, French UDI (center-right) politician and former karate champion: French Senator for Paris since 2011; French Minister of Sports (2010-2011); French Minister for Ecology (2009-2010)
- July 12, 1969 – Anne-Sophie Pic born, French chef, whose restaurant in southern France, Maison Pic, won three Michelin stars; Pic is the fourth woman chef to win three stars
- July 12, 1970 – Aure Atika born in Portugal to Moroccan-Jewish parents, French actress, screenwriter and director; noted for directing À quoi ça sert de voter écolo? (What’s the point of voting Green?), which won the 2004 Prix de la Fondation Beaumarchais for best short film, De l’amour (In Love), and On ne badine pas avec Rosette (Don’t Mess with Rosette)
- July 12, 1972 – Shirley Chisholm receives 152 votes in the first ballot at the Democratic National Convention, becoming the first black candidate for President of the United States from a major political party and the first woman to run for the Democratic presidential nomination
- July 12, 1979 – Brooke Baldwin born, American TV journalist and news anchor; joined CNN in 2008 to anchor CNN Newsroom with Brook Baldwin
- July 12, 1984 – Democratic presidential candidate Walter F. Mondale named New York Congresswoman Geraldine A. Ferraro his running mate, making her the first woman to run on a major party ticket
- July 12, 1990 – Dobsonville shanty town women in Soweto, South Africa, strip to the waist, confronting bulldozers vainly trying to stop demolition of their homes ordered by government authorities. Dobsonville echoes the destruction of Sophiatown in Soweto between 1955 and 1960, (after passage of the Native Resettlement Act No. 19 of 1954), the forcible removal by police of over 60,000 residents, in spite of protests and violent confrontations which the government blames on agitation by the ANC, specifically naming Nelson Mandela
- July 12, 1997 – Malala Yousafzai born, Pakistani universal education and human rights advocate; youngest person to win a Nobel Prize, as co-recipient of the 2014 Peace prize at age 17; she survived a Taliban assassination attempt in 2012, targeted because of her blog, written as ‘BBC Urdu’ which detailed the Taliban occupation of the Swat district of Pakistan, and the NY Times documentary made in 2010 about her. On her 16th birthday in 2016, Malala Yousafzai addressed the United Nations, calling for universal access to education
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- July 13, 1793 – Charlotte Corday stabs Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat in his bathtub. She is tried and executed on July 17. She insisted she carried out the assassination alone, but believing that she had an accomplice who was a lover, her body is autopsied, but they find she was virgo intacta
- July 13, 1863 – Margaret Alice Murray born, British archaeologist, anthropologist, folklorist and feminist. First woman appointed as a lecturer in archaeology in the UK, at London’s University College (1898-1935). Worked closely with Sir Flinders Petrie in Egyptology as his copyist-illustrator and assistant, discovering the Osireion temple at Abydos. Petrie gave her full credit for her work, but she encountered male prejudice from others, and joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), as well as mentoring several promising women students. Wrote books on Egyptology for the general public. In later years, she got into academic hot water over her theories about Christian witch hunts and witch cults
- July 13, 1889 – Emma Asson born, Estonian politician, educator and author, one of first women elected to Estonian parliament, contributed sections on education and gender equality to first constitution of Estonia; wrote first textbook in Estonian language
- July 13, 1910 – Josefina Niggli born in Mexico, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, moved to U.S.after penning prize-winning short stories; novels Mexican Village (1945), Step Down, Elder Brother (1947), later wrote television scripts during “Golden Age” of American TV
- July 13, 1918 – Marcia Brown born, American children’s author and illustrator, won 3 Caldecott Medals for Cinderella, or the Little Glass Slipper (1954), Once a Mouse(1961) and Shadow (1982)
- July 13, 1927 – Simone Veil born, French lawyer and politician, served as the French Minister of Health and championed the 1975 law that legalized abortion in France, the first woman chosen as President of the European Parliament, and as a member of the Constitutional Council of France. A Jewish survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen, she lost her parents and a brother in the Holocaust
- July 13, 1930 – Naomi Shemer born, Israeli singer-songwriter, known for song Yerushlayim Shel Zahav (“Jerusalem of Gold”)
- July 13, 1935 – Monique Vézina born, Canadian politician, Quebec nationalist, and Progressive Conservative Parliament member; appointed as Minister of External Relations, and Minister responsible for La Francophonie, Minister for Employment and Immigration, and several other offices; retired from public service but remained active in the field of international development
- July 13, 1948 – Catherine Breillat born, French filmmaker and novelist; her second film, Une Vraie Jeune Fille (A Real Young Girl), based on her novel Le Soupirail, was banned after its premiere until 1999; in 2004, just months after suffering a stroke which left her partially paralyzed, she went back to work on her film, Une vieille maîtresse (The Last Mistress), one of three French films officially selected for the 2007 Cannes Film Festival
- July 13, 1959 – Fuziah Salleh born, Malaysian politician; took office in 2018 as Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department for Religious Affairs; VP of the People’s Justice Party (PKR) since 2010; PKR Central Political Bureau Member; Member of Parliament for Kuantan since 2008
- July 13, 1966 – Natalia Luis-Bassa born,Venezuelan conductor who now works primarily in England; Musical Director of the Wellington College Symphony Orchestra and the Hallam Sinfonia; also works with the National Children’s Orchestra of Great Britain; she was the first person to earn a degree in Orchestral Conducting in Venezuela; former music director of the Orquesta Sinfónica de Falcón
- July 13, 2016 – Conservative Party leader Theresa May succeeds David Cameron as United Kingdom Prime Minister
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- July 14, 1430 – The Burgundians remand Joan d’Arc to Bishop Cauchon, of Beauvais
- July 14, 1861 – Kate M. Gordon born, American activist, daughter of parents who were both advocates of equality between the sexes, she was a civic leader and prominent advocate of woman’s suffrage in the Southern U.S.; in 1896, she joined the Portia Club, a New Orleans women’s rights group, and became co-founder with her sister Jean of the Equal Rights Association Club; she was National American Woman Suffrage Association corresponding secretary (1901-1909); campaigned and raised funds for the first Louisiana hospital for the treatment of tuberculosis (1909-1913); organizer of the 1913 Southern States Woman Suffrage Conference, and headed the 1918 Louisiana suffrage campaign, the first statewide effort in the American South
- July 14, 1866 – Juliet Wytsman born, Belgian Impressionist painter, noted for her landscapes and gardens
- July 14, 1868 – Gertrude Bell born, British author, archaeologist, explorer, mapmaker, public administrator and spy; influential in the establishment of Jordan and Iraq; traveled extensively in Greater Syria, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, and Arabia (1892-1913); in 1915, her knowledge of the region and fluent Arabic was tapped by British Army Headquarters in Cairo; during WWI, she was the only woman political officer in the British forces, given the title “Liaison Officer, Correspondent to Cairo,” then “Oriental Secretary”; she witnessed the horrors of the Armenian Genocide, reporting that in Damascus, “Turks sold Armenian women openly in the public market,” and in Ras al-Ain in Northern Syria, “the desert cisterns and caves were filled with corpses.” When the war ended, she was assigned to analyze the Mesopotamian situation – after ten months, she presented an official report entitled “Self Determination in Mesopotamia,” but British Commissioner Arnold Wilson wanted an Arab government “under the influence” of British officials who would have the real power and control. A compromise was reached, mainly due to the British government’s desire to cut costs in the Middle East: the British installed Faisal bin Hussein, a trusted ally who had commanded Arab forces with T.E. Lawrence, as the first King of the newly kluged-together nation of Iraq. Bell was an integral part of the Iraqi administration in its infancy, described as “one of the few representatives of His Majesty’s Government remembered by the Arabs with anything resembling affection.”
- July 14, 1911 – Gertrude Goldhaber born, physicist, an early researcher into nuclear structure and the properties of nuclei, the third woman to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences (1972)
- July 14, 1916 – Muriel Snowden born, civil rights worker, co-founder of Freedom House (1949) with husband in Boston, community organization to promote self-sufficiency and social justice
- July 14, 1917 – 16 women from National Women’s Party arrested while picketing the White House demanding universal women’s suffrage; they were charged with obstructing traffic
- July 14, 1929 – Jacqueline, comtesse de Ribes, born, French aristocrat, ready-to-wear fashion designer, theatrical and television producer, philanthropist and ecological activist; producer of the inaugural play at the Recamier Theatre in 1958, then managed the International Ballet of the Marquis de Cuevas after the death of the Marquis (1961-1966). She was co-producer in 1966 of a three-part series for French television, then co-produced Eurovision programs for UNICEF in the 1970s; in 1974 in the Balearic Islands, she became an early advocate for nature conservation and ecology, then orchestrated an international campaign to safeguard the migratory bird refuge on the island of Espalmaor
- July 14, 1936 – Pema Chödrön born, Buddist nun, teacher and author, notable figure in Tibetan Buddhism, possibly first American woman to become a fully ordained Buddhist nun; notable for No Time to Lose: A Timely Guide to the Way of the Bodhisattva
- July 14, 1940 – Susan Howatch born, English author and academic, noted for historical fiction and sweeping family sagas, including Penmarric, The Wheel of Fortune, and the Starbridge series about the Church of England
- July 14, 1946 – Sue Lawley born, veteran English broadcaster; BBC Plymouth subeditor and freelance reporter (1970-1972); reporter/presenter on BBC news magazine Nationwide (1972-1975); anchor on nightly news programme Tonight (1975), then rejoined Nationwide as one of its two anchors (1976-1983); anchor on Six O’Clock News (1984-1989); introduces the BBC Radio 4 Reith Lectures
- July 14, 1957 – Rawya Ateya takes her seat in Egypt’s National Assembly, the first female parliamentarian in the Arab world
- July 14, 1960 – Jane Goodall begins her study of chimpanzees at Gombe Stream Reserve
- July 14, 1960 – Anna Bligh born, Australian politician; leader of the Queensland Labor Party (2007-2012); first woman Premier of Queensland (2007-2012); Member of Queensland Parliament for South Brisbane (1995-2012)
- July 14, 1962 – Vanessa Lawrence born, British geographer, public speaker and first woman Director-General and Chief Executive of Ordnance Survey, Great Britain’s national mapping agency (2000-2014); Honorary Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineering Surveyors and of the Royal Academy of Engineering; a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society; co-founder and inaugural chair of the Association of Chief Executives (ACE)
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- July 15, 1858 – Emmeline Pankhurst born, radical British suffragette and political activist, founder of Women’s Social and Political Union dedicated to “deeds, not words”, named one of the “100 Most Important People of the 20thCentury” by TIME magazine
- July 15, 1890 – Florence Yoch born, landscape architect in Los Angeles; with her partner Lucille Council, they broke down barriers against women professionals in a “man’s field.” Yoch designs attracted a wide clientele, from wealthy patrons in Pasadena to Hollywood’s elite, including Jack Warner, David O. Selznick, George Cukor and director Dorothy Arzner, who hired Yoch to design a garden set for one of her films. This began Yoch’s work as the first woman landscape architect to design outdoor movie sets, including the garden for Tara in Gone With the Wind, rice paddies for The Good Earth, and a field of spring daffodils for How Green Was My Valley
- July 15, 1899 – Estelle Ishigo born, artist, joined her Japanese-American husband in a Wyoming internment camp during WWII, made sketches of her experience for the War Relocation Authority, published “Lone Heart Mountain” in 1972 chronicling her internment. Days of Waiting is a documentary based on her experiences
- July 15, 1905 – Dorothy Fields born, American librettist, and lyricist of over 400 songs for Broadway and film musicals, one of the first successful female Tin Pan Alley songwriters, known for “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love” "The Way You Look Tonight," "A Fine Romance," "On the Sunny Side of the Street," and "I'm in the Mood for Love"
- July 15, 1918 – Brenda Milner born in England, British-Canadian pioneer in clinical neuropsychology, and the study of memory; professor in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University and a professor of Psychology at the Montreal Neurological Institute; explored interaction between the brain’s left and right hemispheres; honored with the 2009 Balzan Prize for Cognitive Neuroscience
- July 15, 1919 – Iris Murdoch born in Ireland, British author and philosopher, wrote 26 novels including: The Sea, the Sea (1978 Booker Prize), The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (Whitbread Literary Award for Fiction), and The Black Prince (James Tait Black Memorial Prize); honored with the 1997 Golden PEN Award for her body of work
- July 15, 1923 – Connie Boucher born, artist, character merchandising industry pioneer, licensed characters like Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts” and Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are”
- July 15, 1927 – Carmen Zapata born of Mexican and Argentinian parents, American actress and activist; co-founder of the Screen Actors Guild Ethnic Minority Committee in 1972; in 1973, co-founder, first president and producer-director of the Bilingual Foundation for the Arts (BFA), which produces plays in English and Spanish
- July 15, 1938 – Carmen Callil born, Australian publisher, writer and critic; notable as founder of Virago Press in 1973, which published women authors, and as creator of Virago’s Modern Classics list, which brought back into print the best “forgotten” women authors of the past; elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2010, and honoured with their Benson Medal in 2017
- July 15, 1939 – Clara Adams completes her trip, becomes first woman passenger to set a world record of 16 days and 19 hours for an around-the-world flight solely on scheduled passenger airlines
- July 15, 1942 – Vivian Malone Jones born, one of the first two black students to enroll at the University of Alabama in 1963, and the university’s first black graduate. She worked as a research analyst for the civil rights division of the U.S. Department of Justice; after she earned a Master’s degree in Public Administration, she worked as an employee relations specialist at the central office of the U.S. Veteran’s Administration. Jones was appointed as Executive Director of the Voter Education Project, then Director of Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, and was Director of Environmental Justice for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) until her retirement in 1996
- July 15, 1943 – Jocelyn Bell Burnell born, Irish astrophysicist, discovered the first four radio pulsars in 1967, when she was still a research student. She was excluded from the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics, which was given for the discovery to her thesis supervisor Antony Hewish and radio astronomer Martin Ryle. Ryles’ work on aperture-synthesis technique and Hewish’s decisive role in the discovery of pulsars were cited in the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ press release announcing the award. Several prominent astronomers criticized her omission. She became the project manager for the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Mauna Kea, Hawaii in 1986; President of the Royal Astronomical Society (2002-2004); Visiting Professor of Astrophysics at Oxford, a Fellow of Mansfield College; President of the Institute of Physics (2008-2010); recipient of Herschel Medal. In 2018, her appointment as Chancellor of the University of Dundee was announced. She is a long-time campaigner for increasing the number and status of women in the fields of astronomy and physics
- July 15, 1950 – Arianna Huffington born in Greece, Greek-American author and syndicated columnist; co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, which was acquired by AOL in 2011 for $315 million USD. She remained as President of the Huffington Post Media Group until 2016, when she left to start Thrive Global
- July 15, 2010 – Same-sex marriage is legalized in Argentina
- July 15, 2013 – Upper house of the U.K. approves same sex marriage in England and Wales, beginning in 2014
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- July 16, 1194 – Clare of Assisi born, Italian founder of the Catholic order of Poor Clares
- July 16, 1546 – Anne Askew, Protestant English poet, “the Faire Gospeler” (lay preacher, one who had many sections of the Bible memorized) is burned at the stake after being tortured in the Tower of London. She was one of the earliest known women poets in the English language, and the first Englishwoman to demand a divorce (she had been married off by her father at age 15 to her eldest sister’s fiancée, Thomas Kyme, after her sister died). She was a devout believer in direct prayer to God, without intercession by priests, while her husband is Catholic; she bore two children (who likely died in infancy) before he threw her out, so she moved to London, resuming her maiden name and became a gospeller. Kyme had her arrested for her preaching, and dragged back, but she escaped and returned to London, then was arrested twice more. The second time she was tortured in the Tower of London, the only recorded torture of a woman there. Ordered to name like-minded women she refuses, and is stretched on the rack, which dislocates joints of wrists, ankles, elbows, knees, shoulders and hips, but Askew still refuses to renounce her beliefs. She is convicted of heresy, and martyred in Smithfield, having to be carried in a chair and then bound unto the stake, unable to stand because of the torture she endured. When she refuses again to recant, she is burned to death. Witness accounts say she didn't cry out until the flames reached her chest. She was not the only victim of the “Act for the Advancement of True Religion” passed in 1543, which restricted the reading of the Bible to clerics, noblemen, the gentry and richer merchants. Women of the gentry and nobility were only allowed to read the Bible in private. Reading the Bible in English was forbidden to "women, artificers, apprentices, journeymen, serving-men of the rank of yeoman and under, husbandmen and laborers"
- July 16, 1821 – Mary Baker Eddy born, American founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist, more commonly known as Christian Science, and of the Christian Science Monitor newspaper; her book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, has been a bestseller for decades
- July 16, 1849 – Clara Shortridge Foltz born, attorney and suffragist; the first woman lawyer in California, first California female deputy district attorney, and founder of the state’s first public defender system. When she discovered that women were excluded from practicing law in California, she drafted an amendment, dubbed the ‘Women Lawyers Bill,’ to the California Code of Procedure, to eliminate both gender and racial discrimination.She joined forces with other feminists in a hard-fought battle to pass it – then refused to leave the Governor’s office until he signed it into law, just seconds before it would have expired. She and fellow suffragist Laura de Force Gordon sued the board of Hastings Law School to gain admission – the lengthy court battle took all her money, and she was never able to attend classes, but practiced law anyway under the amendment she had initiated, and was often referred to as the “Portia of the Pacific”
- July 16, 1862 – Ida B. Wells-Barnett born, American journalist, newspaper editor, public speaker, civil rights leader and feminist, known for her extensive documentation of racial lynchings in the U.S. Formed National Association of Colored Women (1896), and joined the National Equal Rights League, working to get all women the vote
- July 16, 1880 – Emily Stowe is the first woman granted a license to practice medicine in Canada
- July 16, 1880 – Kathleen Norris born, American Catholic author of 93 sentimental novels and innumerable short stories and newspaper columns praising motherhood and large families; ironically, she was so successful that her husband took on most of the household management; she was against birth control, but supported woman’s suffrage, and was involved in the prohibition and peace movements, as well as organizations which benefited children and the poor
- July 16, 1884 – Anna Alexandrovna Vyrubova born, Russian lady-in-waiting and close friend of Tsaritsa Alexandra Fyodorovna, who was the go-between for Alexandra and Rasputin; she was arrested in 1917 and spent five months in prison, which included a medical exam to prove her virginity, and interrogation on her political role. She admitted seeing Rasputin once or twice a week, but feigned a childish innocence; the investigator thought she was too naïve and unintelligent to have any influence over the Tsarina; noted for her memoirs, written after she escaped to Finland
- July 16, 1896 – Evelyn Peer born, African American blues singer, actor with Lafayette Players
- July 16, 1901– Millicent Fawcett is appointed to lead the British government commission to South Africa to investigate conditions in the concentration camps holding Afrikaners, mostly women and children, at the end of the Second Boer War; her report corroborates welfare campaigner Emily Hobhouse’s shocking description of conditions in the camps, where an average of 50 children died every day
- July 16, 1903 – Irmgard Flügge-Lotz born in Germany, German-American mathematician, aerospace engineer and control theorist; pioneer in development of the discontinuous automatic control theory, which has wide application in guidance systems, electronics, fire-control systems, and temperature regulation. In 1961, she became the first woman engineering professor at Stanford University, and the first female engineer elected as a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
- July 16, 1907 – Barbara Stanwyck born as Ruby Stevens, orphaned at age 4, spent time in foster homes, American actor on stage, screen and television for 60 years, highest paid woman in the United States in 1944; a conservative Republican, who believed if she could succeed, then others also could without help
- July 16, 1907 – Frances Rappaport Horwich born, American pioneer in children’s television programming; “Miss Frances” of Ding Dong School (1952-1956 at NBC, 1958-1965 in syndication)
- July 16, 1911 – Ginger Rogers born as Virginia McMath, actor and dancer, partnered with Fred Astaire, won 1941 Academy Award for Best Actress in Kitty Foyle; a Christian Scientist, she refused all medical treatment
- July 16, 1912 – Amy Patterson, born as Amelia Cabeza de Pelayo Patterson, Argentinean composer, poet and music teacher
- July 16, 1924 – Bess Myerson born, American politician, first and only Jewish Miss America, in 1945; New York City’s first Commissioner of Consumer Affairs (1969-1973), and Commissioner of Cultural Affairs (1983-1987); also served on several presidential commissions
- July 16, 1927 – Shirley Hughes born, English author and illustrator, who has written over 50 books, which have sold more than 11 million copies, and has also illustrated 200 others; honored in 1977 and 2003 with the Kate Greenaway Medal for Illustration, and won the inaugural Booktrust Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015; noted for Dogger, the Alfie series, and Ella’s Big Chance
- July 16, 1928 – Anita Brookner, CBE born, British novelist and art historian; first woman to hold the position of Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Cambridge (1967-1968), a visiting professorship; awarded the 1984 Man Booker Prize for her novel Hotel du Lac
- July 16, 1929 – Sheri S. Tepper born, American author of science fiction, horror and mystery novels, noted for feminist and ecofeminst scifi, such as The Gate to Women's Country, Beauty (winner of the 1992 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel), and the Arbai Trilogy; her pen names include A. J. Orde, E. E. Horlak, and B. J. Oliphant
- July 16, 1934 – Katherine Ortega born, American Republican politician and banker; Treasurer of the United States (1983-1989); as president of Santa Ana State Bank (1975-1977), she was the first woman chief executive of a bank in California
- July 16, 1938 – Cynthia Enloe born, American feminist writer, theorist and academic; known for her work on gender and militarism, and her contributions to the fields of feminist international relations and political economy; the Cynthia Enloe Award was established in 2015 by the International Feminist Journal of Politics, in conjunction with the academic publisher Taylor & Francis in her honor; author of The Curious Feminist, "Gender" Is Not Enough: The Need for Feminist Consciousness, and Bananas, Beaches, and Bases
- July 16, 1939 – Ruth Fahnbulleh Perry born, Liberian politician; after the First Liberian Civil War, was interim Chair of the Council of State of Liberia (1996-1997), Liberia’s woman head of state; in 1985, she won a seat in the Liberian Senate as a Unity Party candidate, the only opposition party member in the Senate (1985-1989) when the rest of her party boycotted taking their seats to protest the illegitimacy of Samuel Doe’s government. "You can't solve the problems by staying away," she said. After her senate term, she was active in Women Initiative in Liberia, Women in Action for Goodwill and the Association of Social Services, working to end to civil war
- July 16, 1946 – Louise Fréchette born, French Canadian public servant and diplomat; currently working on a nuclear energy and global security research project at the Centre for International Governance Innovation; member of the Global Leadership Foundation; was the first UN Deputy Secretary-General (1997-2006); Canadian Ambassador to the UN (1992-1994); Canadian Ambassador to Argentina (1985-1989); part of Canada’s UN delegation in Geneva (1978-1985)
- July 16, 1946 – Barbara J. Lee born, American Democratic politician; a U.S. Representative from California since 1998; only member of either House to vote against the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), granted to President George W. Bush in 2001 after 9-11, calling it “a blank check to the president to attack anyone involved in the September 11 events — anywhere, in any country, without regard to our nation's long-term foreign policy, economic and national security interests, and without time limit. . .” Lee was also a vocal critic of the Iraqi War, and is an advocate for legislation to create a Department of Peace; strongly in favor of gun control, pro-choice, supporter of legislation to increase affordable housing, and an opponent of the Death Penalty; previously a California state assembly member and state senator; Chair of the U.S. Congressional Black Caucus (2008-2010); Chair of the revived Congressional Social Work Caucus (since 2013)
- July 16, 1950 – Frances Spaulding born, British art historian, specializing in 20th century British art, and author over a dozen major books of period art history, biography, and essays; was editor of The Burlington Magazine (2015-2017), the longest-running art journal in the English language; Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature since 1984
- July 16, 1954 – Jeanette Mott Oxford born, American activist and Democratic politician; first openly lesbian member of the Missouri House of Representatives, since 2005; Executive Director of the Missouri Association for Social Welfare (1991-2000)
- July 16, 1955 – Susan Wheeler born, American poet and academic; has published six volumes of poetry and a novel; won the 1994 Pushcart Prize for her poetry collection Bag o' Diamonds; noted for “The Maud Poems” about her formidable mother
- July 16, 1957 – Alexandra Marinina born as Marina Anatolyevna Alekseyeva in the Ukraine, best-selling Russian author of detective fiction; her 30 novels have sold over 17 million copies, and been translated into 20 languages, but only Confluence of Circumstances is currently available in English translation
- July 16, 1971 – Jeanne M. Holm is promoted to brigadier general in the U.S. Air Force, the first woman brigadier general in the Air Force
- July 16, 1974 – Maret Maripuu born, Estonian libertarian Reform Party politician; Minister of Social Affairs (2007-2009); Vice President of the Riigikogu, the Estonian parliament (2006-2007), and member of the Riigikogu (1999-2007); Tallinn City Council member (1999-2005)
- July 16, 2015 – J.K. Rowling’s sixth Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, sells 9 million copies in the first 24 hours after its release
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SOURCES