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 August 17 through August 31.
This is an on-going, evolving project. So many women have been added to the lists over the past three years that even changing the posts from monthly to twice a month, the pages keep getting longer and more unwieldy – an astonishing and wonderful problem to have! So starting now, the format is changing again.
For the entire previous AUGUST list as of 2017, click HERE:
www.dailykos.com/...
Otherwise, what you’re seeing on this Late August 2018 page are only the NEW people and events, or additional information, found since last year.
The BIG EVENT in American Women’s History in August is of course the certification that the ratification of the 19th Amendment had come to pass, on August 26, 1920. Women across the United States had finally won the battle for their right as citizens to vote.
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 shortly, so be sure to go there next and catch up on the latest dispatches from the frontlines
Late August’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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- August 17, 1858 – Caroline Bartlett Crane born, American suffragist, educator, journalist, reformer, and Unitarian minister. In 1889 Bartlett became pastor of the First Unitarian Church of Kalamazoo, and led the church in starting the first free public kindergarten, a school of manual training and domestic science, a gymnasium for women, a day nursery, a cafeteria and the Frederick Douglass Club for the “young colored people of the city.” The church continued to expand until it outgrew its building. In 1894, the church moved into a new building, renamed “People’s Church.” She was also known for public health and sanitation reforms, inspected and wrote sanitary surveys for over 60 cities, campaigned for meat inspection ordinances, and succeeded: before 1900, Michigan had the highest standards in the nation
- August 17, 1900 – Vivienne de Watteville born, British travel writer and adventurer; her mother died when she was 9; thereafter her father referred to her as “Murray, my son.” In 1923, Vivienne, age 24, took charge of a hunting and fauna-specimen-collecting (she handled all the taxidermy) expedition to the Congo and Uganda led by her father, after he was killed by a lion. Her first book, Out in the Blue, is a description of her experiences on safari. She spent months (1928-1929) in Kenya photographing and filming elephants, camping for 5 months in the Massai Game Preserve with porters from the 1923-1924 expedition and her Irish Setter, then 2 months on Mount Kenya collecting seeds and sketching flora; when she got a bad toothache, she pulled out the tooth herself with pliers; her second book, Speak to the Earth: Wanderings among Elephants and Mountains, was published in 1935; her last book, Seeds that the Wind may bring, is a soul-searching account of a her impulsive decision to rent a house on Port-Cros off the Côte d’Azur, after a visit with her Swiss grandmother, thinking of using it as a “rest-home for world-weary friends.” This idyll turns into a tension-fraught winter of high winds and her young Italian servant becoming passionately obsessed with her, then driven to frenzies of jealousy when her friend “Bunt” (Captain George Gerard Goschen) comes to visit. Bunt shares her love of solitude, natural beauty, music and games. In spite of her fears about losing her freedom, and saddling herself with the wrong companion for the rest of her life, she finally allows herself to fall in love with Bunt, and they become engaged. They marry in July 1930, move to Shropshire, and have two children, David and Tana (named for the River Tana in Kenya). Seeds that the Wind may bring is not published until 1965, eight years after her death from cancer. Ernest Hemingway was influenced by her two books on Africa, and originally included a quote from Speak to the Earth as an epigraph to his story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”
- August 17, 1900 – Pauline A. Young born, African-American historian, teacher, librarian, and community activist. Her father died when she was a child, and her family moved from Massachusetts to Wilmington, Delaware, to live with her mother’s family. She and her siblings were raised by her mother, grandmother and her aunt, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, a writer and activist who greatly influenced Pauline. Pauline joined the NAACP at the age of 12, and remained a participating member for the rest of her life. Civil Rights activists and writers such as W.E.B. DuBois and James Weldon Johnson would stop overnight at their house while traveling because there was no hotel in the area which would allow Negro guests. She went to Howard High School, the only school for black children in the state of Delaware, where her mother and aunt both taught. Young became the only black student in her class at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, earning a B.A. in history and English, then did some graduate work on educational tests and measurements. After two brief jobs in unrelated fields, she taught social studies and Latin at a segregated high school in Newport News, Virginia. There, she was thrown off a bus for refusing to give up her seat to a white man. She returned to Wilmington in 1928, and became a librarian, then a history and Latin Teacher, at her old high school. After receiving her graduate degree in 1935 from the Columbia University School of Library Service, she taught at the University of Southern California, then became a member of the press staff at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. In 1942, she completed 114 hours of ground school work and 12 hours of dual flight at the black-owned Coffey School of Aeronautics in Chicago. In 1943, she went through 50 hours of pre-flight instruction for teachers at Temple University, then taught pre-fight at Howard High’s night school. Young was chair of the Delaware NAACP education committee, and a coordinator of membership drives in Delaware, and during her time in Chicago. She also served on the Wilmington Council on Youth as the representative for the Wilmington Federation of Teachers. She wrote book reviews for The Baltimore Afro-American, The Wilson Bulletin for Librarians, and The Journal of Negro History, and countless letters to the editors of newspapers, and to publishing companies advocating for better Black representation and opportunities. She was a founder of the Delaware Fellowship Commission, which fought against segregated facilities and discriminatory hiring practices, and campaigned for equal opportunity for nurses’ training. Young wrote the chapter “The Negro in Delaware: Past and Present” in the three volume Delaware: a History of the First State, which was the first published comprehensive history of Black Americans in Delaware
- August 17, 1920 – Lida Moser born, American ‘New York school’ photographer and author; noted for photojournalisn and street photography; she started as an assistant in photographer Berenice Abbott’s studio in 1947; she got her first independent assignment from Vogue in 1949, travelling across Canada, then did work for Harper’s Bazaar, Look and Esquire. Moser wrote “Camera View” articles (1974-1981) for The New York Times and articles for many photography magazines. Also published both how-to books on photography and a number of collections of her photographs. Her work fetches prices in the thousands, and is displayed at over 40 museums worldwide
- August 17, 1936 – Margaret Heafield Hamilton born, American computer scientist and systems engineer, noted for paradigm of Development Before the Fact (DBFT) for systems and software design, and for coining “software engineer.” Hamilton is founder and CEO of Hamilton Technologies (since 1986). She was Director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, and lead developer of on-board flight software for NASA’s Apollo space program (1964-1973). Recipient of numerous awards, including the 1986 August Ada Lovelace Award, the 2003 NASA Exceptional Space Act Award, and a 2016 Presidential Medal of Freedom
- August 17, 1945 – Rachel Pollack born, American scifi, ‘magic realism’ fantasy novelist and comic book author; Unquenchable Fire won the 1989 Arthur C. Clarke Award; Godmother Night won the 1997 World Fantasy Award; has also written non-fiction books on the Kabbalah, the Tarot and the history of the Goddess; she is a transsexual who writes frequently on transgender issues
- August 17, 1946 – Martha Coolidge born, American filmmaker, producer, editor, and screenwriter; president of the Directors Guild of America (2002-2003); began her career making award-winning documentaries; noted for Not a Pretty Picture, Valley Girl, Rambling Rose, Real Genius and the TV miniseries Introducing Dorothy Dandridge
- August 17, 1953 – Herta Müller born in Romania of Banat Swabian heritage, German-language novelist, poet-lyricist and essayist; won the 2009 Nobel Prize in literature; noted for depicting “the landscape of the dispossessed.” After publication in 1984 of her second book, Drückender Tango (Oppressive Tango), a collection of short stories, her work was banned in Romania, and she moved to Germany
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- August 18, 1629 – Agneta Horn born, Swedish autobiographer, whose family often traveled with her father, a Swedish Count and military officer, during Sweden’s war with Denmark, until he was captured and held for eight years as a prisoner of war. When her mother died, she was sent to live with an aunt she detested. She married a soldier in 1648, and went with him to Poland and Germany, but he was killed in Poland, and she returned home as a 26-year-old widow with four children, where she ran her estates. She is remembered for her account of her life and travels, Agneta Horn’s Leverne
- August 18, 1900 – Ruth Grigorievna Bonner born, Soviet Communist activist who was sent to a labor camp during Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge. In 1937, she was a health official in Moscow when her husband was arrested on charges of espionage and sentenced to death. She was arrested a few days later, and spent 8 years in the Gulag in Kazakhstan, then another 9 years in internal exile. In 1954, she was one of the first of Stalin’s victims to be “rehabilitated” under new Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Her husband was rehabilitated posthumously. Then her daughter, human rights activist Yelena Bonner, and her son-in-law, Andrei Sakharov, were exiled to Gorky in 1980. Ruth Bonner, at age 80, was allowed to move to the U.S. to be with her grandchildren. After her daughter was released, she came home in 1987 and died in Moscow a few months later
- August 18, 1911 – Klara Dan von Neumann born in what was Austria-Hungary, Hungarian-American pioneer in computer science. As a teenager she was a figure skating champion. She emigrated to America in 1938 to be with her second husband, physicist John von Neumann. By 1943, she was the head of the Statistical Computing Group at Princeton University. In 1946, she and her husband moved to Los Alamos National Laboratory where she worked on programming the MANIAC I machine designed by John von Neumann and Julian Bigelow. She was also involved as a primary programmer, and in designing new controls, for ENIAC
- August 18, 1914 – Lucy Ozarin born, American psychiatrist and physician, one of the first seven women in psychiatry who served as commissioned officers during WWII. After Pearl Harbor, almost all the male staff left the state hospital where she was working, leaving her the only physician for 1000 patients, and she quickly felt overwhelmed. When Federal legislation established the W.A.V.E.S. as part of the U.S. Naval Reserve in 1942, she decided to join. The hospital refused to approve her request for leave, so she resigned her position. As an “officer and a gentleman” (the Navy just used the commission papers for women that they already had for men), she started an Assistant Surgeon, Lieutenant Junior Grade. With no military training, she was immediately assigned to the military hospital at Bethesda, Maryland, then sent to Camp Lejeune. There, the hospital’s commander assigned her to doing physical examinations on civilian applicants for laborer jobs, even though male doctors with only 90 days of psychiatric training were treating psychiatry patients. A colleague helped her get a transfer, and she returned to Bethesda, to treat WAVES. She also studied for and passed the boards in psychiatry (1945). After the war, she went to work for the Veterans Administration, and was soon promoted to Chief of Hospital Psychiatry. She visited all of the Veterans Hospitals to investigate and make recommendations on clearing up the backlog of mental health services. She started programs for VA hospital staffers to improve their skills in relating to patients, and a training institute for clinical directors on advances in psychiatry. Ozarin joined the U.S. Public Health Services in 1957, working in the Kansas City regional office while studying for a Masters in Public Health, which she earned in 1961. The National Institute of Mental Health chose her as one of 5 people to write the regulations and establish community health centers across the U.S. after passage of the 1963 Community Mental Health Act. She was an advocate for deinstitutionalization of psychiatric patients. In the 1970s, she did a study for the World Health Organization (WHO) on drug and alcohol treatments in 9 European countries, then convened a conference to report her findings, attended by representatives from 21 countries. After her “retirement” in 1983, she volunteered to catalog medical books, and thousands of documents, medical dissertations, and publications for the National Library of Medicine, to facilitate medical research. Received the Director’s Honor Award for her efforts in 2008. Even in her late nineties, she continued working, this time as author of over 50 mini-biographies of notable psychiatrists, posted at Wikipedia. She lived to be 103 years old
- August 18, 1920 – 19th Amendment Yellow Rose Day: The U.S. Constitution’s 19th Amendment is ratified, giving women the right to vote. But it almost didn’t happen. Battle of the Roses: Yellow roses were worn by suffrage supporters, red roses by opponents. Tennessee became the 36th and deciding state to ratify the 19th Amendment, by a single vote. That vote was cast by 24-year-old Harry Burn, who had been in the anti-ratification camp and was still wearing his red rose when he voted for passage, because he had received a last-minute letter from his mother that morning. Phoebe Ensminger Burn, called “Miss Febb,” wrote, “Hurrah, and vote for suffrage! Don’t keep them in doubt. I notice some of the speeches against. They were bitter. I have been watching to see how you stood, but have not noticed anything yet.” She ended the missive with a rousing endorsement of the suffragist leader Carrie Chapman Catt, imploring her son to “be a good boy and help Mrs.Catt put the ‘rat’ in ratification.” He explained his sudden change of heart, “I know that a mother’s advice is always safest for her boy to follow, and my mother wanted me to vote for ratification.”
- August 18, 1921 – Lydia Litvyak born, Soviet fighter pilot during WWII, the first woman fighter pilot to shoot down an enemy aircraft, and one of the first two women certified as aces. Shot down and killed by the Germans during the Battle of Kursk in 1943
- August 18, 1937 – Sheila Cassidy born, English doctor who is a leader in the UK hospice movement. She completed her medical studies at Oxford University in 1963. In the 1970s, she went to practice medicine in Chile when Salvador Allende was president. In 1975, after Cassidy gave medical treatment to Nelson Gutierrez, a political opponent of the new Pinochet regime being sought by police, she was arrested by the Chilean secret police and kept in custody without trial, and severely tortured at the notorious Villa Grimaldi, trying to force her to disclose information about her patients and other contacts. The combined efforts of the British Embassy and Argentinean diplomat Roberto Kozak secured her release, and she was expelled from Chile. The interviews she gave about her imprisonment and torture on the parrilla (a metal frame to which a victim is strapped and subjected to electric shock) brought attention in the UK to the widespread human rights abuses in Chile. She also published her account in Audacity to Believe. After her recovery from her ordeal, she continued to practice medicine. She was medical director of the new St. Luke’s Hospice in Plymouth (1982-1997), and set up palliative care service for Plymouth hospitals. Since retiring from St. Luke’s, she’s been an advocate for hospice, and written books with hospice and religious themes
- August 18, 1944 – Paula Danziger born, American author of over 30 children’s books, including The Cat Ate My Gymsuit, and the Amber Brown series
- August 18, 1972 – Victoria Coren Mitchell born, English professional poker player, weekly columnist for The Observer, and television presenter of the BBC quiz show Only Connect since 2008
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- August 19, 1900 – Dorothy Burr Thompson born, classical archaeologist, art historian and academic; a leading authority on Hellenistic terracotta figurines; the first graduate from Bryn Mawr College with a major in Greek and archaeology, summa cum laude in 1923; she then studied at the American School of Classical Studies, and worked on excavations at Phlius on the Peloponnese peninsula with Carl Blegen. She discovered a tholos (‘beehive’) tomb in 1925, which was the burial place of the king and queen of Midea. Completed her Ph.D. at Bryn Mawr in 1931. In 1933, she was the first woman appointed as a Fellow of the Athenian Agora excavations, where Canadian archaeologist Homer Thompson was the assistant director of field work. They were married in 1934. In between giving birth to three daughters, she still did some work on the Athenian excavations, discovering the garden of the Temple of Hephaistos in 1936. The family moved to Princeton NJ in 1946 when Homer Thompson accepted a chair at the Institute for Advanced Study, where she continued to carry out her research and publish her work. In 1987, she was awarded the Gold Medal for Distinguished Achievement by the Archaeological Institute of America
- August 19, 1933 – Bettina Cirone born, American portrait photographer, worked as a Ford model in the 1960s, then began her photographic career in 1970, shooting landmark buildings in downtown Manhattan, then switched to portrait photography of political figures and celebrities
- August 19, 1938 – Nelly Vuksic born, Argentinian choral conductor and singer. When her family could not afford to pay for her secondary education, she earned the money herself by playing the piano and singing, then studied conducting at the National University of Rosario, and conducted the University’s youth choir, and later, its adult choir. After graduation in 1969, she married pianist Cesar Vuksic, and they went to the U.S. when he got a scholarship to Ball State University in Indiana. After arriving, she was also offered a scholarship continue her studies in music, and also to learn English. She became the conductor of the school’s women’s chorus, and earned her Ph.D. in conducting in 1978. In New York City, after some lean years when she had to take jobs cleaning houses and performing in night clubs, she was hired by Hugh Ross, choral director of the Schola Cantorum, as a singer. She went on to found the Americas Vocal Ensemble, and has taught at the Bloomingdale School of Music, Columbia University; now Director of the Conservatory Chorale at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music
- August 19, 1946 – Dawn Steele born, one of the first women to run a major Hollywood Studio, beginning in merchandising and rising through the ranks of production to President of Production at Paramount Pictures in 1985, and took over as President of ailing Columbia Pictures (1987-1990), but after a string of loses, she resigned, and the studio was sold to Sony Corporation. Next, she formed Steel Pictures and made films for the Walt Disney Company (1990-1993), then she became a partner in Atlas Entertainment (1994-1997); her 1993 memoir, They Can Kill You But They Can’t Eat You, described her tenure at Columbia. In Steel’s obituary, Norah Ephron said she was the first powerful woman in Hollywood to hire large numbers of women as executives, producers, marketing people and directors
- August 19, 1947 – Anuška Ferligoj born, Slovenian mathematician; noted for her work in network analysis, multivariate analysis, social networks, and survey methodology. Professor of Multivariate Statistics and head of the graduate program on Statistics at the University of Ljubljana, and Fellow of the European Academy of Sociology
- August 19, 1950 – Jennie Bond born, English journalist and television presenter; the BBC’s Royal Correspondent (1989-2003); has published several books on Britain’s Royal Family
- August 19, 1955 – Patricia Scotland born in Dominica, British Leeward Islands, Baroness Scotland of Asthal, called to the Middle Temple in 1977, specializing in family law. In 1991, she became the first black woman to be appointed as a Queen’s Counsel, then was elected as a Bencher of the Middle Temple. She was named as a Millennium Commissioner, and a member of the Commission for Racial Equality, in 1994. Received a Life Peerage in 1997, and is a Lord Temporal Member of the House of Lords. Parliamentary Under-secretary of State (1999-2001), then Parliamentary Secretary (2001-2003). Appointed as Attorney General (2007-2010) then Advocate General (2010) for Northern Ireland, and also served as the first woman Attorney General for England and Wales (2007-2010). Currently the first woman Secretary-General of the Commonwealth of Nations (since 2016)
- August 19, 1957 – Gerda Verburg born, Dutch politician and trade union member; Permanent Representative of the Kingdom of the Netherlands to the United Nations organizations for Food and Agriculture since 2011; Member of the House of Representatives of the Netherlands (2010-2011); Minister of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality (2007-2010); youth worker then member of the board of the construction trade union for the National Federation of Christian Trade Unions in the Netherlands (1982-1997)
- August 19, 1975 – Chynna Clugston Flores born, freelance American comic book creator; known for her manga-influenced teen comedy series Blue Monday
- August 19, 1988 – Veronica Roth born, American writer and dystopian novelist, known for her Divergent trilogy
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- August 20, 1955 – Janet Royall born, Baroness Royall of Blaisdon, British Labour Co-operative Party politician and academic; Principal of Somerville College, Oxford since 2017; Leader of the House of Lords (2009-2010); became a member of the Privy Council in 2008, and Lord President of the Council (2008-2009); Lord Temporal of the House of Lords since 2004; head of the European Commission Office in Wales (2003)
- August 20, 1961 – Amanda S. Berry born, OBE; CEO of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) since 2000; BAFTA’s Director of Development and Events (1988-2000); Scottish Television Enterprises (1990-1997); London Weekend Television (LWT – 1989); Duncan Heath Associates (1983-1988)
- August 20, 1988 – Sarah R. Lotfi born, American filmmaker, noted for films inspired by historical figures and events, including The Last Bogatyr and Menschen
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- August 21, 1886 – Ruth Manning-Sanders born in Wales, British poet and author of children’s books and collections of folk and fairy tales, who published over 90 books; noted for her series, A Book of . . . which tell tales of magical creatures of all kinds, from A Book of Giants (1962) to A Book of Magic Horses (1984)
- August 21, 1921 – Jaymala Shiledar born, Indian Hindustani classical singer and stage actress, influential in reviving Marathi musical theatre
- August 21, 1933 – Dame Janet Baker born, British mezzo-soprano, noted for her acting ability, performances in Italian operas and works by Benjamin Britten and Gustav Mahler
- August 21, 1945 – Celia Brayfield born, English novelist, non-fiction writer, and cultural commentator; author of Pearls, White Ice, Getting Home, and Heartswap
- August 21, 1968 – Laura Trevelyan born, BBC World News television journalist and anchor; BBC United Nations correspondent (2006-2009)
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- August 22, 1860 – Eleonore Reuss of Köstritz born, Tsaritsa of Bulgaria as the second wife of Tsar Ferdinand of Bulgaria; she worked as a nurse during the Balkan and First World Wars
- August 22, 1868 – Maud Powell born, American violinist, first American violinist to achieve international rank; awarded GRAMMY Lifetime Achievement Award posthumously in January 2014
- August 22, 1902 – Leni Riefenstahl born, Nazi film producer-director, noted for Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will) and Olympia, two of the most technically innovative and terrifyingly effective propaganda films ever made
- August 22, 1922 – Theoni V. Aldredge born in Greece, American costume designer; won three Tony Awards, 11 other Tony nominations, an Irene Sharaff Lifetime Achievement Award, and the 1975 Oscar for Best Costume Design for The Great Gatsby
- August 22, 1964 – Diane Setterfield born, British novelist and academic; noted for her Gothic romance The Thirteenth Tale, and a ghost story, Bellman & Black
- August 22, 1977 – Keren Cytter born, Israeli visual and performance artist, and novelist
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- August 23, 1918 – Anna Mani born, Indian physicist and meteorologist; began as a clerk for the Indian Meteorological Department in 1948, but became head of the Pune division by 1953, supervising over 120 men. In 1969, she was transferred to Delhi as the Deputy Director General, and retired in 1976. Made contributions in the field of meteorological instrumentation, and conducted research on solar radiation, ozone and wind energy measurements; member of the International Ozone Association, the Indian National Science Academy, American Meteorological Society, International Solar Energy Society, World Meteorological Organisation, and the International Association for Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics
- August 23, 1922 – Nazik Al-Malaika born to a feminist poet mother and academic father; Iraqi poet, one of the most influential women poets in Iraq. Notable as the first Arabic poet to use free verse, in her ground-breaking second book of poetry, Sparks and Ashes. Her poems covered nationalism, social and feminist issues, honour killings and alienation. She left Iraq with her husband and family in 1970 after the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party came to power, moving to Kuwait, until it was invaded by Saddam Hussein in 1990, and then to Egypt, where she lived for the rest of her life in Cairo. Her other three books of poetry are And the sea changes its colour, Bottom of the Wave, and The Night’s Lover
- August 23, 1941 – Onora O’Neill born, Baroness O’Neill of Bengrave, philosopher, academic and House of Lords crossbench member; British Academy President (2005-2009), the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences; Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge (1992-2006); founding President of the British Philosophical Association (BPA); author of works on political philosophy, ethics, international justice, bioethics, the importance of trust, consent and respect for autonomy in a just society, and the philosophy of Immanuel Kant
- August 23, 1954 – Halimah Yacob born, Singapore Independent politician; President of Singapore; National Singapore University Chancellor since 2017; Speaker of the Parliament of Singapore (2013-2017); Member of Parliament (2001-2017)
- August 23, 1958 – Roberta Rudnick born, American earth scientist and professor of geology at University of California, Santa Barbara; world expert on the continental crust and lithosphere; fellow of the American Geophysical Union since 2005, and member of the National Academy of Sciences since 2010; awarded the 2012 Dana Medal by the Mineralogical Society of America; editor-in-chief of Chemical Geology (2000-2010)
- August 23, 1983 – Athena Farrokhzad born in Iran, Iranian-Swedish poet, playwright, translator, literary critic, and controversial host of the Sverges Radio show Sommar since 2014; joint winner of the Karin Boye Literary Prize in 2013
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- August 24, 1900 – Maria Zubreeva born, Russian Soviet realist (Leningrad school) painter and portraitist, graphic artist and designer
- August 24, 1904 – Ida Cook born, English civil servant, novelist under the pen name Mary Burchell, and Jewish rescuer; with her sister, Mary Louise Cook, and funded mainly by her writing, helped 29 Jews escape from the Nazis during the late 1930s. They also used their love of opera as a cover for making numerous trips into Germany to smuggle valuables out (hidden amongst their going-to-the-opera finery) for Jewish families, after Jews were severely restricted by law in what they could take with them as they left Germany; ‘Mary Burchell’ was known for her romance novels; as Ida Cook, she published We Followed Our Stars, the story of the sisters’ rescue operation; in 1965, the Cook sisters were honored as Righteous Gentiles by Yad Vashem in Israel
- August 24, 1926 – Nancy Spero born, American visual artist, anti-war and feminist activist, noted for epic-scale works, including a linear mosaic in NY subway walls at Lincoln Center station, and collage on paper; member of the Art Workers Coalition, Women Artists in Revolution, and Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists; founding member of A.I.R. Gallery (Artists in Residence)
- August 24, 1945 – Ronee Blakley born, singer-songwriter, actor, producer; women’s rights activist
- August 24, 1952 – Marion Bloem born, Indonesian-Dutch writer and filmmaker; author of Geen gewoon Indisch meisje (No Ordinary Indo Girl) and as director of the feature film Ver van familie (Far from Family)
- August 24, 1959 – Meg Munn born, Deputy Chair of the Board of Governors of Sheffield Hallam University, and Chair of the British Council’s Society Advisory Group; international consultant on governance, including parliamentary processes gender, political party development, gender mainstreaming and women in leadership, working with organizations such as the Inter-Parliamentary Union and UN Women; British Labour Member of Parliament (2001-2015); advocate for women in STEM and other non-traditional careers
- August 24, 1972 – Ava DuVernay born, American producer, director, screenwriter and film distributor; the first African American woman to win the Sundance Film Festival directing award, in 2012 for Middle of Nowhere; Director of the feature film Selma, which was nominated for an Academy award as Best Picture 2014, and the recently released A Wrinkle in Time; creator and producer of the TV series, Queen Sugar
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- August 25, 1900 – Isobel Hogg Kerr Beattie born, Scottish architect, likely the first professional woman architect in Scotland; after graduating from the Edinburgh College of Art in 1926, she briefly worked in an office, then set up independently (1928-1929) before returning to the College of Art to get an advanced degree. She then worked for the Edinburgh firm Jamieson & Arnott, and was admitted as an Associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1931
- August 25, 1925 – Thea Astley born, Australian novelist and short story writer, sometimes used pen name Philip Cressy (she sold her first poem under that name because men were paid ₤5, but women were only paid ₤3); Astley won Australia’s major literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award four times, more than any other Australian writer, at a time when the Australian literary scene was heavily dominated by men; noted for The Well Dressed Explorer, The Slow Natives, The Acolyte, The Kindness Cup and Drylands
- August 25, 1934 – Lise Bacon born, French Canadian Liberal politician; Member of the National Assembly of Quebec (1973-1976 and 1981-1994); Secretary of State for Social Affairs ( 1973-1975); Minister of Consumers, Co-operatives and Financial Institutions (1975-1976); Minister of the Environment (1988-1989); Senator (1994-2009)
- August 25, 1937 – Virginia Euwer Wolff born, American children’s author; noted for her award-winning series Make Lemonade
- August 25, 1945 – Hannah L. Shearer born, American television writer and producer; writer-producer for the TV series Emergency!; wrote episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- August 25, 1962 – Taslima Nasrin born, Bangladeshi author, poet and physician who has been in exile since 1994. Her first writings were mainly poetry, often about female oppression and written in graphic language. In the early 1990s, she published three collections of essays and three novels. In 1993, her novel Lajja (Shame), about a Hindu family attacked by Muslims, radically changed her life. Muslims, outraged by her negative portrayal of Islamic philosophy, called for a ban of the novel, and she was physically attacked. The Council of Islamic Soldiers, a radical fundamentalist group, offered a bounty for her death. In 1994, she was misquoted in a newspaper interview, and was charged with “making inflammatory statements.” Thousands of demonstrators labeled her “an apostate” who vilified Islam. After two months in hiding, she escaped to Sweden, ceasing her medical practice to become a full-time writer, and activist for women’s rights and freedom of expression. When her Bangladeshi passport was revoked, she was granted citizenship by Sweden, and spent time in Western Europe and America. She has also lived at times in India, but her books continue to be feminist, frank about her sexuality, and critical of Islamic subjugation of women, so the protests, banning of her books, and fatwas calling for her death have continued. She has been honored with numerous awards, from a 1994 Human Rights Award from the French government, to 1994 Kurt Tucholsky Prize from Swedish PEN and 1994 Feminist of the Year from Feminist Majority Foundation, and 2002 Freethought Heroine Award from Freedom from Religion Foundation
- August 25, 1963 – Tiina Intelmann born, Estonian diplomat; current head of the EU Delegation in Liberia since 2014; President of the Assembly of States Parties of the International Criminal Court (2011-2014); Estonia’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations (2005-2011)
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- August 26, 1695 – Marie-Anne-Catherine Quinault born, French singer and composer, composed motets for the Royal Chapel at Versailles, awarded the Order of Saint Michael
- August 26, 1918 – Katherine Goble Johnson born, African American mathematician whose calculations of orbital mechanics for NASA were critical to the success of the first and subsequent U.S. manned spaceflights. During her 35-year career at NASA and its predecessor, NACA, she mastered complex manual calculations, including calculating trajectories, launch windows and emergency return paths for Project Mercury spaceflights, and rendezvous paths for the Apollo lunar lander and command module on flights to the Moon. Her calculations were also critical during the early stages of the Space Shuttle program, and she worked on plans for a mission to Mars. Honored with a 2015 Presidential Medal of Freedom
- August 26, 1920 – 19th Amendment of U.S. Constitution officially certified as ratified: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” 72 years after the Seneca Falls Convention, American women are finally acknowledged as citizens
- August 26, 1925 – Etelka Keserű born, Hungarian economist and Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party politician, Minister of Light Industry (1971-1980), after serving as the Deputy Minister of Light Industry (1967-1971); member of the Hungarian Women’s National Council (1971-1990)
- August 26, 1926 – Anahit Tsitsikian born, notable Armenian violinist, and music scholar who specialized in Armenian musicology, and ancient music history; founder of a branch of Armenian musical archaeology
- August 26, 1935 – Karen Spärck Jones born, British computer scientist, who worked on natural language processing and information retrieval; noted for the concept of inverse document frequency, a technology which is the basis of most modern search engines; outspoken advocate for women’s careers in computing; fellow and Vice President (2000-2002) of the British Academy; President of the Association for Computational Linguistics (1994), and recipient of its 2004 Lifetime Achievement Award; also honored with the British Computer Society 2007 Lovelace Medal
- August 26, 1944 – Dame Judith A. Rees born, geographer; interim Director of London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE – 2001-2012) and Director of LSE’s ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy (hosted jointly with University of Leeds), and of Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment; appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 2013
- August 26, 1956 – Sally Beamish born, British composer and violist, formerly with the Raphael Ensemble; recipient of the 1993 Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for outstanding achievement in composition
- August 26, 1957 – Nikky Finney born, American poet; raised by parents active in the Civil Rights Movement, she is an advocate for social justice and cultural preservation; Guy Davenport Endowed Professor of English at the University of Kentucky (1993-2013); author of four books of poetry, Finney won the 2011 National Book Award for Head Off & Split, and the 1999 PEN/Beyond Margins Award
- August 26, 1964 – Allegra Huston born in England, New Mexico-based novelist, non-fiction and screenplay writer; noted for Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found, Bloomsbury, and her novel, Say My Name
- August 26, 1970 –Betty Friedan opens a nationwide protest called the Women’s Strike for Equality in New York City on the fiftieth anniversary of women’s suffrage, sponsored by the National Organization for Women. There were 20,000 activists on Fifth Avenue on New York City, 5,000 on Boston Common, 2,000 in San Francisco’s Union Square, and 1,000 in Washington DC. Smaller groups participated in Syracuse and Manhasset in NY State, and in Detroit, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and St. Louis
- August 26, 1971 – First Women’s Equality Day, initiated by Representative Bella Abzug (D-NY), is established by Presidential Proclamation, now reaffirmed annually
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- August 27, 1834 – Clara Erskine Clement born, traveler and author; History of Egypt, and Women Artists in Europe and America
- August 27, 1875 – Katherine McCormick born, American biologist, philanthropist, and women’s rights activist; as an undergraduate at MIT, she refused to wear the fashionable ladies hats required by the administration, arguing that the feathers in vogue at the time were a fire hazard in the laboratories – and the requirement was rescinded. She was vice president and treasurer of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and funded its publication, The Woman’s Journal. She was a key organizer of Carrie Chapman Catt’s campaign for ratification of the 19th Amendment, which is where she first met Margaret Sanger and became involved in promoting the legalization of birth control. After ratification of the 19th Amendment, McCormack was the first vice president of the League of Women Voters, but also continued to work on birth control issues, even smuggling hundreds of diaphragms from Europe for Singer’s Clinical Research Bureau. She established the Neuroendocrine Research Foundation (1927-1947) at Harvard which studied the link between endocrinology and mental illness. Beginning in the 1950s, she funded research into oral contraception from the development and testing of the first pill through the 1960s, providing almost $2 million USD (equivalent to $23 million today) to the Worchester Foundation for Experimental Biology. She also donated the money to build a woman’s dormitory at MIT which could house 200 students. Prior to this, housing for female students was limited to 50 women. This increased the number of women students at MIT from 3% of the student body to 40%. When she died in 1967, her will provided $5 million to the Stanford University School of Medicine to support female physicians, $5 million to Planned Parenthood Federation of America, which funded the Katharine Dexter McCormick Library in New York City, and $1 million to the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology
- August 27, 1886 – Rebecca Clarke born, English viola player and composer, one of the first women to become a professional player in an orchestra when she was hired by Sir Henry Wood to play in the Queen’s Hall Orchestra in 1912; she faced difficulties as a composer because some critics insisted that no woman could have written such quality work. In one contest, she submitted pieces under her own name, and one under the pseudonym of Anthony Trent. The piece by “Anthony Trent” was praised, while the works submitted under her own name were largely ignored
- August 27, 1924 – Rosalie E. Wahl born, American lawyer, judge and peace activist; first woman named to the Minnesota state Supreme Court (1977-1994)
- August 27, 1924 – The “Famous Five” Canadian women file their petition to Supreme Court of Canada, asking, “Does the word ‘Persons’ in Section 24 of the British North America Act, 1867, include female persons?”
- August 27, 1948 – Deborah A. Swallow born, English museum curator, historian and academic; director of the Courtauld Institute of Art since 2004; Keeper of the Asian Department and Director of Collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum (1983-2004); assistant curator of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Darwin College and lecturer at Girton College (1974-1983)
- August 27, 1949 – Leah Jamieson born, American computer scientist, engineer and academic; Dean of Engineering and Ransburg Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University; member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering; 2007 President of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE); founder of Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS), a multi-university engineering design teams program working with non-profit community organizations; recipient of the 2005 Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology and the 2007 Anita Borg Institute of Women Vision Award for Social Impact
- August 27, 1953 – Joan Alison Smith born, English novelist, non-fiction author, journalist and human rights activist; on staff at The Sunday Times (1979-1984), also a contributor for The Guardian and The New Statesman; known for her Loretta Lawson crime novels; feminist and atheist; outspoken supporter of Classics in state schools; 2015 chair of the Labour Humanists, supports secularist policies and humanist values within the Labour Party
- August 27, 1959 – Denice Denton born, American electrical engineer, professor and administrator; the first woman professor in engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to win tenure; Dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Washington (1996-2005), the first woman to lead an engineering college of a major research university; Chancellor of the University of California, Santa Cruz (2005-2006); while under treatment for depression, she committed suicide in 2006
- August 27, 1959 – Jeannette Winterson born, English writer, journalist and organic delicatessen owner; noted for Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, which won the 1985 Whitbread Prize for First Novel; Written on the Body won the 1994 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, and Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? was awarded the 2013 Lambda for Lesbian Memoir/Biography
- August 27, 1968 – Daphne Koller born, Israeli-American Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University; co-founder of Coursera, an online education platform; noted for work on artificial intelligence and its applications to biomedical sciences; honored with the inaugural ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in Computing Sciences and the 2001 IJCAI Computers and Thought Award; member of the National Academy of Engineering since 2011
- August 27, 1976 – Audrey C. Delsanti born, French astronomer and biologist; awarded a NASA Postdoctoral Fellowship in astrobiology at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii in 2004
- August 27, 1985 – Alexandra Nechita born, Romanian American cubist painter and sculptor; selected by the World Federation of United Nations Associations to lead a Global Arts initiative in 1999
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- August 28, 1921 – Lidia Gueiler Tejeda born, Bolivian politician; Acting President of Boliva (1979-1980), Bolivia’s first woman Head of State; President of the Bolivian Chamber of Deputies (1979); Member of the Congress of Bolivia (1956-1964)
- August 28, 1942 – Wendy E. Davies born, Welsh historian and academic; Emeritus Professor of History at University College, London; noted for her studies of Welsh and Briton history, and her analysis of the Llandaff Charters; founding Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales; and co-director of the interdisciplinary Celtic Inscribed Stones Project, to record the location, known data and inscriptions of all the inscribed stones in the UK
- August 28, 1969 – Sheryl Sandberg born, COO of Facebook since 2008, and in 2012 she became the first woman on Facebook’s board of directors; founder of Leanin.org, which gives advice that often makes women feel they are self-sabotaging their careers when the real problem is institutionalized gender discrimination
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- August 29, 1728 – Maria Anna Sophia of Saxony born; as the wife of Maximillian III Joseph, she becomes Electress of Bavaria, and negotiates with Frederick II of Prussia to ensure Bavaria’s independence from Austria
- August 29, 1824 – Eliza Allen Starr born, American artist, art critic and educator, noted for books on Catholic art
- August 29, 1924 – Dinah Washington born, American jazz and blues singer and pianist
- August 29, 1931 – Lise Payette born, French Canadian feminist, Parti Québécois politician, radio show editor and host, and columnist for the Journal de Montreal (2004-2007) and Le Devoir (2007-2016); Member of the National Assembly of Quebec (1976-1981), she served during that time as Minister for Consumer Affairs, Minister of State for the Status of Women, and Minister of State for Social Development; she was responsible for the updating of the Civil Code of Quebec to allow two surnames for children; honored with the 1997 Florence Bird Award by the International Centre for Human Rights and Development, and made an Office of the National Order of Quebec in 2001
- August 29, 1938 – Angela Huth born, English journalist, novelist, playwright and BBC presenter; she has published 3 collections of short stories and 11 novels, noted for her best-selling novel Land Girls, about the British women who did farm work during WWII taking the place of men who were soldiers; Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature since 1978
- August 29, 1946 – Francine D. Blau born, American economist and Frances Perkins Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and professor of economics at Cornell University; first woman honored with the 2010 IZA Prize in Labor Economics for her “seminal contributions to the economic analysis of labor market inequality.” Also recipient of the 2001 Carolyn Shaw Bell Award from the American Economic Association Committee of the Status of Women in the Economic Profession, and the 2017 Jacob Mincer Award by the Society of Labor Economists for lifetime contributions to the field. Her books include Equal Pay in the Office, Gender and Family Issues in the Workplace, and The Economics of Women, Men and Work
- August 29, 1947 – Temple Grandin born, American professor of animal science at Colorado State University, and consultant to the livestock industry on animal behavior. Grandin is a prominent and widely cited proponent for the humane treatment of livestock for slaughter. She is also a spokesperson for autism, one of the first individuals on the autism spectrum to publicly share her personal experience. Inventor of a ‘hug box’ device which has a calming effect, and author of Emergence: Labeled Autistic, and Thinking in Pictures. She was originally diagnosed at the age of two as having ‘brain damage,’ which wasn’t confirmed until she was 64 years old, by cerebral imaging. Her mother was the first to hypothesize that she was autistic when Grandin was in her teens, but a formal diagnosis was not made until she was in her 40s. She has also been identified as an autistic savant
- August 29, 1952 – Karen Hesse born, American childrens and YA author, and poet; winner of the 1998 Newberry Medal for her book Out of the Dust, and the 2012 Phoenix Award from the Children’s Literature Association for Letters from Rivka
- August 29, 1969 – Jennifer Crittenden born, American screenwriter and producer; noted for episodes for The Simpsons, Everybody Loves Raymond and Seinfield. She was also an executive producer on Everybody Loves Raymond, and a producer on Seinfeld
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- August 30, 1787 – Mary Thomas born, poet and early South Australian settler whose diaries and letters, first published in 1915, are a detailed account of early colonial life
- August 30, 1821 – Anita Garibaldi born, Brazilian comrade-in-arms and wife of Italian nationalist Giuseppe Garibaldi. A skilled horsewoman, while pregnant, she escapes after being captured by enemies during the Battle of Curitibanos by stealing a horse; when it is shot out from under her, she wades into the river Canoas. Her pursuers assume she will drown, and leave her for dead. She survives for four days without food or water before she finds help, and reunites with Garibaldi; a few months later she gives birth their son
- August 30, 1907 – Bertha Parker Pallan born, the first Native American woman archaeologist, of Abenaki and Seneca descent, daughter of Arthur C. Parker, archaeologist and first president of the Society for American Archaeology; she worked on a dig in Nevada for the Southwest Museum of Los Angeles, and later as an archaeologist and ethnologist at the museum
- August 30, 1909 – Virginia Lee Burton born, American children’s author and illustrator; her book The Little House won a Caldecott Award; she founded the textile collective Folly Cove Designers
- August 30, 1912 – Nancy Wake born in New Zealand, British agent during WWII, a Special Operations Executive member who became a leading figure in the French Resistance; one of the Allies most decorated servicewomen of the war, by 1943 she was the Gestapo’s most wanted person with a 5 million franc price on her head
- August 30, 1923 – Barbara Ansell born, British physician; founder of pediatric rheumatology, developing a system of classifying childhood arthritis, and specialized in research and treatment of Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis
- August 30, 1923 – Charmian Clift born, Australian writer, essayist and memoirist; she wrote essays for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Herald in Melbourne (1964-1969); known for her memoirs Mermaid Singing and Peel Me a Lotus, and her novel Honour's Mimic; alcoholism and a disintegrating marriage contributed to her suicide in 1969
- August 30, 1935 – Alexandra Bellow born in Romania, Romanian American mathematician who has contributed to the fields of ergodic theory, probability and analysis; 1987 Humboldt Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
- August 30, 1944 – Dame Frances Cairncross born, British economist, journalist and academic; Senior Fellow at the School of Public Policy, UCLA; chair of the Executive Committee of the Institute for Fiscal Studies; Rector of Exeter College, Oxford (2004-2014); chair of the Economic and Social Research Council (2001-2007); on the staff of The Economist (1984-2004); economics correspondent (1973-1981) and staff writer (1973-1984) for The Guardian newspaper
- August 30, 1944 – Molly Ivins born, American columnist, political commentator, humorist and author; she was the first woman police reporter at the Minneapolis Tribune, then joined the Texas Observer in 1970 and where she covered the Texas legislature. She worked for the New York Times (1976-1982) which hired her for her colorful writing style, and then tried to get her to tone it down. She returned to Texas to become a columnist for the Dallas Times Herald (1981-1991), and then the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (1992-2001), which was syndicated and carried by hundreds of newspapers. Her 1991 book Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She? was on the New York Times bestseller list for 29 weeks
- August 30, 1958 – Karen P. Buck born, British Labour Party politician; Member of Parliament for Westminster North since 1997; MP for Regent’s Park/Kensington N. (1997-2010); Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Transport (2006)
- August 30, 1958 – Muriel Gray born, Scottish horror novelist, broadcaster on Channel Four’s music show The Tube, and journalist who has written for Time Out, The Sunday Herald, and The Guardian; the first woman Rector of the University of Edinburgh, the first female chair of the Glasgow School of Art board of governors; appointed to the board of trustees of The British Museum since 2015; elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2018; Patron of the Scottish charity Trees for Life, which is working to restore the Caledonian Forest
- August 30,1958 – Anna Politkovskaya born to Ukranian parents, Russian journalist, writer, and human rights activist who reported on Russian political events, especially the Second Chechen War (1999-2005), which made her national and international reputation, refusing to give up reporting in spite of intimidation, arrest by Russian military forces, and being poisoned on a flight from Moscow which forced her to turn back for medical treatment. Her post-war articles about conditions in Chechnya were re-published in book form, but her worl was mainly accessed by Russian Readers through Novaya Gazeta, a Russian newspaper known for its often-critical investigative coverage of Russian political and social affairs. She received numerous international awards for her work. In 2004, she published Putin's Russia for readers in the West. She was assassinated in October 2006 in the elevator of her block of flats, which attracted international attention, but the five men arrested and sentenced to prison for the murder never revealed who ordered or paid for the killing
- August 30,1963 – Sabine Oberhauser born, Austrian physician and politician; Austria’s Minister for Health and Minister for Women (2014-2017). She was diagnosed with cancer in 2015, and died in 2017
- August 30, 1966 – Joann Fletcher born, English Egyptologist and visiting professor at the University of York; co-founder of the York University Mummy Research Group, and author of a number of books, including The Search for Nefertiti, which covers the work of a multidisciplinary scientific team to identify one of a group of mummies discovered in 1898 as the famous queen, largely dismissed by other Egyptologists as inconclusive
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- August 31, 1775 – Agnes Bulmer born, English poet, author of one the longest epic poems in the English language, Messiah’s Kingdom, which took over nine years to complete
- August 31, 1879 – Alma Schindler Mahler born in Vienna, composer; successively married to composer Gustav Mahler, architect Walter Gropius and novelist Franz Werfel
- August 31, 1936 – Marva Collins born, American educator and lecturer, founder of Westside Preparatory School in Chicago, Illinois, known for successfully providing a classical education to students from poverty and those often wrongly labeled as learning disabled
- August 31, 1944 – Dame Elizabeth “Liz” Forgan born, English journalist and media executive; worked for The Guardian, editor and columnist (1978-1998), non-executive director of the Guardian Media Group (1998-2006); Chair of the Scott Trust since 2003, owner of Guardian newspapers; Managing Director of BBC Network Radio (1993-1996); Honorary Fellow of the British Academy since 2014; Dame Commander since 2006
- August 31, 1944 – Christine King born, British historian and university administrator; expert on Nazi Germany; Vice-Chancellor and Chief Executive of Staffordshire University (1995-2011); Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
- August 31, 1946 – Ann Coffey born, British Labour politician; Member of Parliament since 1992; Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Chancellor of the Exchequer (2007-2010); counselor to the Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council (1984-1992); social worker (1972-1988)
- August 31, 1947 – Yumiko Ōshima born, Japanese manga artist and member of Year 24 Group; recipient of the 1973 Japan Cartoonists Association Award for Excellence for Mimoza Yakata de Tsukamaete
- August 31, 1955 – Julie Maxton born in Scotland, British barrister, legal scholar, and academic administrator; a Master of the Bench of Middle Temple since 2012; Executive Director of the Royal Society since 2011; Registrar of the University of Oxford (2006-2010); at the University of Auckland in New Zealand she was a lecturer, professor and acting Deputy Vice-Chancellor (1985-1992), Professor of Law (1993-2000), and then Dean of the Faculty of Law (2000-2005)
- August 31, 1956 – Mária Balážová born, Slovak contemporary artist, sculptor and printmaker; member of the artists’ group East of Eden
- August 31, 1956 – Tsai Ing-wen born, Taiwanese Democratic Progressive politician, legal scholar and attorney; current President of Taiwan (the Republic of China) since 2016, the first president of both Hakka and aboriginal descent, and the first to be elected without previously serving as Mayor of Taipei; a cat lover, and advocate for animal protection, she appeared frequently during her campaign with her cat
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SOURCES
Hmm — I really did think that not including the previous entries, except for major landmarks or when I’ve found new information, would make these posts shorter — maybe by next year I won’t be finding so many new-to-me women with fascinating lives and accomplishments? It does prove that women are, and always have been, a lot more than what mankind has expected us to be.