Welcome to WOW2 — Early April!
WOW2 is a twice-monthly sister blog to This Week in the War on Women. This edition covers women and events from April 1 through April 15.
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.
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!
April is Black Women’s History Month, and we have a number of phenomenal African American women with birthdays and major milestones this month. It’s also National Poetry Month, and we have some exceptional poets too.
For the entire previous EARLY APRIL list as of 2018, click HERE:
Otherwise, what you’re seeing on this Early April 2019 page are only the NEW people and events, or additional information, found since last year.
These trailblazers have a lot to teach us about persistence in the face of overwhelming odds. I hope you will find reclaiming our past as much of an inspiration as I do.
This Week in the War on Women
just posted, so be sure to go there next to catch
up on the latest dispatches from the frontlines:
www.dailykos.com/...
Early April’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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- April 1, 528 – The daughter of Emperor Xiaoming of Northern Wei, an unnamed baby girl, whom her grandmother, Empress Dowager Hu, had falsely claimed was a male child, is installed by the Empress Dowager on the throne upon the death of the baby’s father, but Hu replaces her the next day with Yuan Zhao, a 3-year-old cousin of the late emperor, whose reign lasts only 46 days. General Erzhu Rong sends troops to depose Empress Dowager Hu as regent, drowns her and Yuan Zhao in the Yellow River, then puts Yuan Ziyou on the throne as emperor. Nothing is written of the fate of the unnamed baby girl who was “Emperor” for a day
- April 1, 1693 – Puritan minister Cotton Mather’s four-day-old son dies, and witchcraft is blamed; his writings and sermons strongly influence the infamous Salem witch trials, in which over 200 people, mostly women, were accused, and 20 were executed
- April 1, 1776 – Sophie Germain born, French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher; despite opposition from her parents and society, she taught herself from books in her father’s library, corresponded with famous mathematicians, such as Lagrange, Legendre and Gauss. A pioneer of elasticity theory, she won the grand prize from the Paris Academy of Sciences for her essay on the subject. Her work on Fermat’s Last Theorem was a foundation for mathematicians exploring the subject for hundreds of years after. She was excluded from a career in mathematics because she was a woman, but worked independently throughout her life. The Academy of Sciences established the Sophie Germain Prize in her honor
- April 1, 1792 – Etta Palm d’Aelders born in the Netherlands, Dutch-French feminist advocate for the rights of women, proposes a comprehensive divorce bill that allows for wife-initiated divorce, because of her concerns about wife beating, saying the lesser physical strength of women requires laws that protect them against their stronger fathers and husbands
- April 1, 1865 – Irene Morales born, Chilean seamstress, soldier, and nurse during the War of the Pacific against Bolivia
- April 1, 1877 – Aurelia Henry Reinhardt born, American educator and peace and women’s rights activist, first woman moderator of American Unitarian Association (1940-1942), president of Mills College (1916-1943), president of the American Association of University Women (1923-1927); delegate at the inaugural meeting of the United Nations in 1945
- April 1, 1895 – Alberta Hunter born, American blues singer-songwriter and cabaret singer, who was also a nurse; her first recording was made in 1921 and her last in the 1980s; in 1928, she starred in Showboat with Paul Robeson in London. In 1976, after 20 years working as a nurse, she made a stunning musical comeback, appearing at Café Society in Greenwich Village, and was signed by Columbia Records. She later sang for President Jimmy Carter at the White House. She died in 1984 at age 89
- April 1, 1902 – Maria Polydouri born, notable Neo-romantic Greek poet, feminist and progressive writer. She contracted tuberculosis, and wrote her best poems during the times she was hospitalized, between 1926 and 1930. She died in 1930 at the age of 28
- April 1, 1911 – Augusta Braxton Baker born, African American librarian and storyteller; when she applied to Albany Teacher’s College, she was turned down because of her race, but Eleanor Roosevelt, whose husband was at that time governor of New York, was serving on the Albany Interracial Council, and heavily advocated for Baker. The school was reluctant to admit a black student, but didn’t want to offend the governor’s wife, so they admitted Baker. She taught in public school until 1937, when she was hired as the children’s librarian at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library in Harlem. In 1939, the branch began an effort to add children’s literature which did not portray black people as derogatory stereotypes. The collection led to publication of a number of bibliographies of books for and about black children for the first time, including Baker’s 1946 extensive bibliography titled Books about Negro Life for Children which was updated and retitled The Black Experience in Children’s Books in 1971. She was appointed Storytelling Specialist and Assistant Coordinator of Children’s Services in 1953, then promoted to Coordinator of Children’s Services in 1961, becoming the first African-American librarian in an administrative position in the New York Public Library, overseeing children’s programs in the entire NYPL system and setting policies for them. Baker was a consultant for the children’s television series Sesame Street. She retired in 1974, but returned to work in 1980 in the newly created position of Storyteller-in-Residence at the University of South Carolina, until her second retirement in 1994. She was also the co-author with Ellin Green of Storytelling: Art and Technique, published in 1987
- April 1, 1940 – Wangari Muta Maathai born, Kenyan political and environmental activist, founder of the Green Belt Movement, giving education and a monetary token to rural Kenyan women for planting trees, recipient of 2004 Nobel Peace Prize
- April 1, 1963 – Aprille Ericsson-Jackson born, American aerospace engineer; first African American woman to earn a Ph.D. in engineering at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; won the 1997 Women in Science and Engineering Award for best female engineer in the U.S. government; currently instrument manager for a proposed Mars mission to collect dust from the Martian lower atmosphere
- April 1, 2001 – The Netherlands becomes the first country to make same-sex marriage legal
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- April 2, 1647 – Maria Sibylla Merian born in Germany, naturalist and scientific illustrator who spent years in Amsterdam, and traveled to Surinam in South America to study its flora and fauna; she was one of the first naturalists to observe insects directly; her major work is Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (1705)
- April 2, 1731 – Catharine Macaulay born, English historian and radical political writer. She had regular correspondence with such figures involved in the American Revolution as Mercy Otis Warren, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Ezra Stiles, and George Washington. As an author, she is noted for The History of England from the Accession of James I to the Revolution; Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth; and Letters on Education
- April 2, 1917 – Jeannette Rankin (Republican-Montana) begins the first day of her term as the first woman member of U.S. House of Representatives, on the same day that President Woodrow Wilson asks Congress to declare war on Germany: “The world must be made safe for democracy.” Rankin, an avowed pacifist, will be one of the few to vote against declaring war, which will cost her re-election; later, she is elected again, just in time to cast the only dissenting vote against WWII after Pearl Harbor
- April 2, 1917 – Linda Hunt born, American actress; won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Billy Kwan in The Year of Living Dangerously, the first person to win an Oscar for playing a character of the opposite sex
- April 2, 1945 – Anne Waldman born, American poet, performer, scholar and cultural/political activist; recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s 1996 Shelley Memorial Award
- April 2, 1946 – Sue Townsend born, English playwright, screenwriter, humorist and novelist; best known for creating the character Adrian Mole, first noted in the radio drama, The Diary of Nigel Mole, Aged 13¼, but he became the main character in her Adrian Mole series of novels, after the publisher insisted on changing his first name because of the character Nigel Molesworth created by Ronald Searle and Geoffrey Willans
- April 2, 1947 – Tua Forsström born, Finnish writer and poet who writes in Swedish; her poetry collection Efter att ha tillbringat en natt bland hästar (After Spending a Night Among Horses) won the Nordic Council’s 1998 Literature Prize. Snöleopard (Snow Leopard) was translated into English by David McDuff, for which he won the Poetry Book Society’s 1990 Translation Award
- April 2, 1948 – Joan D. Vinge born, American Science Fiction author and poet; noted for her novel, The Snow Queen, won the 1981 Hugo Award for Best Novel, which was followed by sequels The Summer Queen, World’s End and Tangled Up in Blue
- April 2, 1953 – Rosemary Bryant Mariner born, American aviator; she joined the U.S. Navy in 1973, and was one of the first six women to earn their wings as U.S. Navy Aviators in 1974. She was the first woman military aviator to fly a tactical jet, the first woman aviator assigned to an aircraft carrier, and the first to command an operational aviation squadron, Tactical Electronic Warfare Squadron Thirty Four (VAQ-34) during Operation Desert Storm (1990-1991). Mariner was president of the Women Military Aviators (1991-1993). In 1993, when restrictions were removed on women pilots flying combat missions, she was one of four women aviators promoted to captain. She retired from the Navy in 1997, and was a resident scholar in the Center for the Study of War and Society and a lecturer in the Department of History from 2002 to 2016 at the University of Tennessee. She died of ovarian cancer in 2019. The Navy conducted the first all-woman pilot nine-aircraft ‘Missing Man Flyover’ for her funeral
- April 2, 1953 – Malika Oufkir born, Moroccan Berber writer; when her father, General Mohamed Oufkir, was executed for his part in an attempted coup d’état in 1972, her family were first confined to house arrest in southern Morocco (1973-1977). Then they were sent to a secret prison in the Sahara desert for 15 years, then kept under house arrest. In 1991, they were among a small group of political prisoners to be released. Malika Oufkir moved to Paris with her brother Raouf and sister Soukaina in 1996. Her book, Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail, the story of their ordeal, was written in French with Tunisian author Michèle Fitoussi
- April 2, 1957 – Caroline Dean born, British biologist and plant scientist; her work focuses on the molecular controls used by plants to seasonally determine when to flower, with a particular interest in vernalisation – the acceleration of flowering in plants by exposure to periods of prolonged cold. She has been honored with the 2007 Genetics Society Medal, the 2015 FEBS (Federation of European Biochemical Societies) EMBO Women in Science Award, and is a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO)
- April 2, 1987 – Nnoseng Ellen Kuzwayo (1914-2006) becomes the first Black woman to receive an honorary degree from the University of the Witwatersrand, the third oldest university in South Africa. She was a teacher (1938-1952) until the Apartheid regime introduced Bantu education. She next became a social worker. After the 1976 Soweto uprising, she was the only woman on a committee of ten created to organize civic affairs in Soweto, and was detained for five months under the Prevention of Terrorism Act for her activism. Kuzwayo was elected as a Member of Parliament (1994-1999) in the nation’s first democratic election, and wrote several books, including her autobiography, Call Me Woman, which highlights her struggle with domestic violence during her first marriage, and won the South African Central News Agency Literary Award
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- April 3, 1791 – Anne Lister born, British traveler, diarist and mountaineer; first woman to climb Monte Perdido in the Aragonese Pyrenees and Vignemale, the highest peak in the French Pyrenees; often called the “first modern lesbian” because her wealth allowed her to live openly as a couple with another wealthy heiress, Ann Walker, from 1834 until Lister’s death in 1840; her diaries run to four million words, where the details of her lesbian relationships from her school days on are written in a private code
- April 3, 1836 – Harriet Prescott Spofford born, American author and poet, began writing to earn money when her parents became ill; wrote Gothic romances and detective stories
- April 3, 1903 – Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay born, Indian social reformer, advocate for raising the socio-economic status of Indian women, and freedom fighter; remembered as the driving force behind the renaissance of Indian handicrafts, hand looms, and Indian performing arts. Several Indian cultural institutions exist today because of her influence: the National School of Drama, Sangeet Natak Akademi (a national academy for music, dance and drama), Central Cottage Industries Emporium, and the Crafts Council of India. India’s second-highest civilian honor, Padma Vibhushan, was conferred on her by the Indian government in 1987
- April 3, 1924 – Roza Shanina born, Soviet Sniper, first female sniper to be awarded the Order of Glory; she was killed in action while guarding a severely wounded commander
- April 3, 1928 – Jennifer Paterson born, British chef who co-hosted with Clarissa Dickson Wright the popular BBC TV cooking series, Two Fat Ladies. The series originally ran from 1996 to 1999, but has been repeated frequently on the UK Good Food Channel, in the U.S. on the Food Network and the Cooking Channel, and on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Paterson also wrote a cookery column for The Spectator
- April 3, 1934 – Jane Goodall born, British primatologist-anthropologist-ethologist; 45-year study on chimpanzees in Tanzania; founder of the Jane Goodall Institute
- April 3, 1934 – Pamela Allen born, New Zealand children’s book author and illustrator; she has published over 50 picture books; her first book, Mr Archimedes’ Bath, won the 1980 Ethel Turner Prize in the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards, and Who Sank the Boat? won a 1984 International Board on Books for Young People honour diploma. Eight of her books have been adapted for the stage by the Patch Theatre Company, and performed at the Sydney Opera House
- April 3, 1943 – Hikaru Saeki born, first woman admiral of the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force, and first woman to achieve star rank in the JMSDF; she was originally an obstetrician-gynecologist, then joined the JMSDF in 1989. After her service in several military hospitals and medical rooms aboard naval vessels, she became the first woman to head a JSDF hospital in 1997, was promoted to rear admiral in 2001, and retired in 2003
- April 3, 1945 – Doon Arbus born American writer and journalist; collaborator with photographer Richard Avedon, on the books Alice in Wonderland: The Forming of a Company and the Making of a Play, and The Sixties. She is a contributor to Rolling Stone and The Nation. Since her mother, photographer Diane Arbus, committed suicide in 1971, she has managed her mother’s estate, and served as consultant and/or contributor to several books about her mother, including Diane Arbus Revelations, and Untitled, which she designed and edited with Yolanda Cuomo
- April 3, 1946 – Hanna Suchocka born, Polish lawyer, politician and diplomat; first woman Prime Minister of Poland (1992-1993); served as Polish Ambassador to the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (2002-2013) and the Holy See (2001-2013)
- April 3, 1948 – Arlette Cousture born, French Canadian historical novelist and screenwriter; noted for Les filles de Caleb (The Daughters of Caleb), which became a Quebec TV series, and Ces Enfants d’ailleurs (These Children from Elsewhere), which was also made into a television series. In 1998, she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada
- April 3, 1951 – Annette Dolphin born, British Professor of Pharmacology in the Department of Neuroscience, Physiology and Pharmacology at University College London; a leader in the field of neuronal voltage-gated calcium channels, and focused on the regulation of calcium channel trafficking and function, and the modulation of that function by activation of G-protein coupled receptors. Her work on the control of calcium channel trafficking by auxiliary calcium channel subunits has been particularly influential. She has received the British Pharmacological Society (BPS) Sandoz Prize and the Pfizer Prize in Biology. Dolphin was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 1999, and a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2015
- April 3, 1953 – Sandra Boynton born, American humorist, cartoonist, children’s book author and illustrator, songwriter, director, music producer, and designer og greeting cards, calendars, paper goods, clothing and plush toys. She won the 2008 Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Cartoonists Society’s highest honor
- April 3, 1954 – Elisabetta Brusa born, Italian composer, now a naturalized British citizen; best known for her orchestral works
- April 3, 1958 – Francesca Woodman born, American photographer, best known for her black-and-white studies of women
- April 3, 1965 – Nazia Hassan born, Pakistani pop singer-songwriter, lawyer and social activist; widely popular in Pakistan, India and Southeast Asia. Her English-language single “Dreamer Deewane” was the first song by a Pakistani singer to make it on the British charts. Hassan had degrees in economics and law from universities in London. She was a supporter and fundraiser for the Inner Wheel Club of India, an international women’s organization, and an active member of Voice of Women, and the National Youth Organisation. She was a major supporter of mobile medical clinics in the densely populated Lyari Town section of Karachi, raised funds for children in Tharparkar and Rajasthan, and gave away toys to thousands of poor children. Hassan worked for the United Nations Security Council in 1991-1992, and served as a cultural ambassador for UNICEF in 1993. She died of lung cancer in 2000. The Nazia Hassan Foundation has opened schools to educate street children
- April 3, 1980 – Megan Rohrer born, American Evangelical Lutheran pastor, the first openly transgender minister ordained by the church, in 2006. Rohrer has been pastor at Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church in San Francisco since 2014, and in 2017 became the first LGBTQ chaplain for the San Francisco Police Department. Rohrer is Executive Director of the Welcome ministry to the homeless and hungry, growing and distributing food from community gardens, and an advocate for trans people
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- April 4, 1868 – Philippa Fawcett born, English mathematician and educator; she was the daughter of suffragist Millicent Fawcett, president of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (1897-1919), and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first English woman physician was her aunt. In 1890, she became the first woman to make the top score on the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos exams, 13% higher than the highest-placed man, but she didn’t receive the title of senior wrangler, as only men were then ranked. Women were listed separately without titles, having only been allowed to take the Tripos since 1881, when Charlotte Angas Scott was unofficially ranked eighth. On the 1890 women’s list, Fawcett is only described as “above the senior wrangler.” No woman was officially awarded the first position until Ruth Hendry in 1992. Fawcett won the Marion Kennedy scholarship, and conducted research in fluid dynamics. She was a college lecturer in Mathematics at Newnham College for 10 years, then left Cambridge to train mathematics teachers at the Normal School in Johannesburg, and also set up schools in South Africa. In 1905, she returned to take a position in the administration of education for London County Council, where she developed secondary schools. Denied a Cambridge degree because she was a woman, she became of the “steamboat ladies,” women of Girton, Newnham and Somerville Colleges, refused degrees they would have been given by British Universities if they were men. They traveled to Ireland, where the University of Dublin gave them ad eundem degrees (earned degrees for work done at another college) at Trinity College Dublin, after Trinity began admitting women in 1904. Trinity gave about 720 women ad eundem degrees between 1904 and 1907
- April 4, 1872 – Mary Coffin Ware Dennett born, pacifist, advocate for women’s rights, suffrage, birth control, and sex education; published Birth Control Laws, which reviewed the laws and argued for free dissemination of information; she continues to mail sex education pamphlets labeled obscene in 1922, leading to her arrest and conviction in 1929 – a storm of protest and the case made by the ACLU to the federal Court of Appeals wins reversal of her conviction in 1930
- April 4, 1887 – Argonia, Kansas elects Susanna M. Salter as the first woman mayor in the U.S.
- April 4, 1902 – Louise Lévêque de Vilmorin born, French novelist, poet and journalist; she was awarded the 1949 Renée Vivien prize for women poets; her best remembered novel is ‘Madame de . . .’
- April 4, 1914 – Marguerite Duras born, French novelist, screenwriter, playwright and director
- April 4, 1921 – Orunamamu born as Marybeth Washington in the U.S., American-Canadian storyteller. She worked as a school teacher, then after her retirement, she became a professional storyteller and griot (West African word for a bard-historian/storyteller- praise singer); she was the subject of two documentaries, and mentioned in numerous books and articles. She was a regular participant in the Calgary Spoken Word Festival. Orunamamu lived to be 93 years old
- April 4, 1928 – Maya Angelou born, American memoirist and poet; best known for I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
- April 4, 1931 – Dame Catherine Tizard born; first woman elected as mayor of Auckland City, NZ (1983-1990) and the first woman appointed as Governor-General of New Zealand (1990-1996); the 100th anniversary of New Zealand Women’s Suffrage is celebrated during her term of office; while in office, she ends the practice of New Zealanders bowing to the Governor-General, saying, “No New Zealander should have to bow to another.” Dame Catherine also ended the practice of members of staff ceasing to clean whenever the Governor-General enters the room
- April 4, 1932 – Johanna Reiss born, Dutch writer based in New York City; noted for her memoir, A Hidden Life, and her young adult novels, The Upstairs Room, and The Journey Back, based on the three years she spent as a young Jewish girl hiding from the Nazis during WWII, and her return years later to visit the farming family that had sheltered her
- April 4, 1939 – Darlene Hooley born, American high school teacher and Democratic politician; U.S. Representative for Oregon’s 5th District (1997-2009); Clackamas County Board of Supervisors (1987-1996); member of Oregon state House of Representatives (1980-1987); in 1976, she was the first woman to serve on the West Linn City Council
- April 4, 1942 – Elizabeth Levy born, prolific American children’s book author; noted for children’s mystery series, Something Queer is Going On
- April 4, 1944 – Magda Aelvoet born, Belgian-Flemish politician, a Minister of State since 1995; provincial Senator for Antwerp (1999-2002); Member of the European Parliament and President of the EU Greens Party (1994-1999)
- April 4, 1944 – Mary Kenny born, Irish author, broadcaster, playwright, journalist and founding member of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement. She was Woman’s Editor of The Irish Press in the 1970s. In 1971, she travelled with Nell McCafferty, June Levine and other Irish feminists on the “Contraceptive Train” from Dublin to Belfast to buy condoms, which were illegal at that time in the Republic of Ireland. Later that year she became Features Editor of The Evening Standard in London
- April 4, 1948 – Anna King born, British author of ten novels; noted for her first novel, Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries, a semi-autobiographical story of dealing with Crohn’s Disease and its impact on the main character and her family
- April 4, 1975 – Delphine Arnault born, French businesswoman; director and executive vice president of Louis Vuitton (LVMH Group) since 2003, the first woman and youngest person to be a member of the LVMH management board; in 2014 Arnault started the LVMH Prize, an international competition for young designers
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- April 5, 1761 – Sybil Ludington born, at age 16, becomes an American Revolutionary War heroine, when she rides to warn American colonial forces the British approach on April 26, 1777, riding twice the distance of Paul Revere
- April 5, 1901 – Hattie Elizabeth Alexander born, American pediatrician and microbiologist, developed treatments for Haemophilus influenzae (influenzal meningitis), reducing the mortality rate from nearly 100 percent to less than 25 percent; among the first scientists to identify antibiotic resistance, which she correctly concluded was caused by random genetic mutations in DNA; first woman president of the American Pediatric Society
- April 5, 1907 – Hester Elizabeth Cornelius born, South African national organiser and branch secretary of the Garment Workers’ Union (GWU). Cornelius played an important role in the defence of the union by organising cultural activities, which used Afrikaner symbols and experiences to convey class struggle
- April 5, 1911 – 150,000 to 500,000 people march in New York City in the funeral procession for the seven unidentified victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire in late March
- April 5, 1922 – American Birth Control League, founded by Margaret Sanger, forerunner of Planned Parenthood, is incorporated in New York
- April 5, 1925 – Janet D. Rowley born, American geneticist who was the first scientist to identify a chromosomal translocation as the cause of leukemia and some other cancers; she advanced in the University of Chicago’s Department of Hematology from research associate in 1963 to full professor by 1977, improving existing methods of staining to make identifying chromosomes easier; her findings of the link between abnormal chromosomes and cancer was met with some initial resistance, but has become immensely influential, leading to over 70 translocations being identified across different cancers; recipient in 1998 of both the Lasker Award and the National Medal of Science, and in 2009, the Presidential Medal of Freedom
- April 5, 1933 – Barbara Holland born, American author who wrote in defense of modern-day vices like cursing, drinking alcohol, eating fatty foods and smoking cigarettes in essays collected in books like Pleasures: In Defense of Naps, Bacon, Martinis, Profanity, and Other Indulgences – she died of lung cancer at age 77. Her response to Virginia Woolf’s famous quote, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” was “No, Mrs. Woolf.” She must have “A job, Mrs. Woolf.”
- April 5, 1938 – Nancy Holt born, American sculptor, installation artist and creator of monumental land art; notable for Sun Tunnels in the Utah Desert, Dark Star Park in Rosslyn VA, and Solar Web in Santa Monica CA
- April 5, 1950 – Ann C. Crispin born, American science fiction writer; noted for her Young Adult series Starbridge; co-founder with Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware, a watchdog group of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, which issues warnings about scam agents, editors and publishers, and has assisted law enforcement in tracking and shutting down such scams. Crispin died in 2013 after a prolonged battle with cancer
- April 5, 1962 – Sara Danius born, Swedish professor of aesthetics at Södertörn University, literary critic, and author of studies of Marcel Proust, Gustave Flaubert, and James Joyce, and the relationship between literature and society. She was elected to the Swedish Academy in 2013, and became permanent secretary in 2015, but resigned the position in 2018, and later from the Academy amid accusations that her handling of the Jean-Claude Arnault scandal was weak. Arnault was in line to win the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature when charges of sexual assault were made against him by eighteen women. He was tried and convicted of one count of rape in October 2018; when he appealed the verdict, the Svea Court of Appeal found him guilty of two counts of rape, increased his sentence to two years and six months in prison, and added 100,000 kronor (almost $11,000 USD) to his original fine of 115,000 kronor. No Nobel Prize in Literature was given in 2018, and several other Academy members also resigned
- April 5, 1975 – Sarah Baldock born, English organist, choral conductor and music scholar; she was the second woman to be appointed to a senior music post at a Church of England cathedral, in 2008 when she became Organist and Master of the Choristers at Chichester Cathedral (2008-2014)
- April 5, 1975 – Caitlin Moran born, English journalist, author and broadcaster; she writes three columns a week for The Times of London, and was named 2012 Columnist of the Year by the London Press Club; author of How to Be a Woman, which won the 2011 Galaxy National Book of the Year Award. She is a supporter of the British feminist political party, the Women’s Equality Party
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- April 6, 1787 – Celestina Cordero born, a free black Puerto Rican whose parents taught all the children in their family to read and write; founder of the first school for girls in Puerto Rico (1820), where she taught students regardless of their race or social standing; she also became a public speaker advocating public education for women, and after several years of struggle, the Spanish government acknowledged her as a teacher and accredited her school; while her contributions have been largely overlooked until recently, her brother Raphael is recognized as “The Father of Public Education” in Puerto Rico
- April 6, 1867 – Kate Campbell Hurd-Mead born in Canada, American feminist, author and obstetrician, one of the founders of the Middlesex County Hospital in Connecticut, president of the American Medical Women’s Association, author of A History of Women in Medicine: From the Earliest of Times to the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century
- April 6, 1882 – Rose Schneiderman born in what is now Poland, Jewish labor union organizer, feminist and suffragist, her statement: “The woman worker needs bread, but she needs roses too” inspired the poem and song “Bread and Roses,” member Women’s Trade Union League, participant in Uprising of 20,000
- April 6, 1898 – Jeanne Hébuterne born, French artist, and frequent model for painter Amedeo Modigliani
- April 6, 1949 – Alyson J. K. Bailes born, British political scientist and diplomat; her varied career in the UK Foreign Service was greatly helped by her extensive knowledge of languages: she spoke and read French, Hungarian, German, Mandarin Chinese, Norwegian, Finnish and Swedish, with some understanding of Danish, Icelandic, Faroese and Dutch; her first international posting was as Desk Officer at the British Embassy in Budapest; served as Second Secretary in the UK Delegation to NATO (1974-1976); Bailes was frequently given special assignments within the service’s London office, and “loaned out” to other branches in need of her expertise; UK Ambassador to Finland (2000-2002); after retiring, she took a post at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (2002-2007)
- April 6, 1950 – Cleo Odzer born, American writer and nonfiction author; became a rock’n’roll groupie at age 14; spent the 1970s as a hippie in Goa, India; returned to the U.S., went through drug rehab and entered college; Odzer researched prostitution in Thailand as her thesis topic for a Ph.D. in anthropology (New School of Social Research, 1990), which was published as Patpong Sisters: An American Woman’s View of the Bangkok Sex World, followed by Goa Freaks: My Hippie Years in India, and Virtual Spaces: sex and the cyber citizen. She died in Goa in 2001
- April 6, 1955 – Cathy Jones born, Canadian comedian and writer, known for the many characters she has played on the television series, This Hour Has 22 Minutes, which she helped create with Mary Walsh and Greg Thomey; and her one-woman theatrical shows, Wedding in Texas; and Me, Dad and The Hundred Boyfriends; active member of the Green Party of Canada
- April 6, 1998 – Federal researchers in the U.S. announce that daily tamoxifen pills could cut breast cancer risk among high-risk women
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- April 7, 1141 – Empress Matilda becomes the first female ruler of England, adopting the title ‘Lady of the English’ but war with Stephen, her rival for the throne, makes her reign very short-lived
- April 7, 1803 – Flora Tristan born, French-Peruvian author, socialist and feminist; noted for her contributions to early feminist theory. She is considered the first writer to link the freedom of the working class with the advancement of women’s rights, a pioneer in socialist feminism; best known for Peregrinations of a Pariah and The Workers’ Union
- April 7, 1872 – Marie Equi born, American physician, lesbian, abortion provider, suffragist, labor and anti-war activist; recognized by Theodore Roosevelt and the U.S. Army for her services during the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco; spoke against US involvement in WWI and was imprisoned under the Sedition Act for a three-year term and served a year-and-a-half before being released
- April 7, 1889 – Gabriela Mistral born as Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, Chilean poet, diplomat and educator, recipient of 1945 Nobel Prize in Literature; noted for Sonetos de la Muerte (Sonnets of Death); Tala (Harvesting); and Desolación (Despair)
- April 7, 1890 – Marjory Stoneman Douglas born, American journalist, women’s suffrage and civil rights advocate, and tireless environmental activist who campaigned to preserve the Florida Everglades. She worked for the Miami Herald (1915-1923), rising from society columnist to assistant editor, and daily columnist. Best known for her 1947 book, The Everglades: River of Grass which did much to change the popular conception of the Everglades from a worthless swamp to a treasured river system. She played a central role in the protection of the Everglades up until a short time before her death, at the age of 108, in 1998. An obituary in The Independent newspaper in London stated, “In the history of the American environmental movement, there have been few more remarkable figures than Marjory Stoneman Douglas.”
- April 7,1915 – Billie Holiday born, “Lady Day” influential American jazz singer and songwriter
- April 7,1937 – Eleanor Holmes Norton born, American Democratic politician, civil rights activist and feminist; non-voting member of the U.S. House of Representatives for the District of Columbia since 1991. Co-founder in 1990 of African-American Women for Reproductive Freedom. Appointed as the first woman Chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (1977-1981); Assistant Legal Director of the ACLU (1965-1970), where she represented 60 women employees of Newsweek magazine who filed a claim with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that Newsweek had a policy of only hiring men to be reporters. The women won, and Newsweek agreed to allow women to be reporters
- April 7, 1938 – Iris Johansen born, American novelist, primarily in the crime, romantic suspense, and historical romance genres; noted for her long-running Eve Duncan suspense series, in which the leading character is a forensic sculptor
- April 7, 1940 – Marju Lauristin born, Estonian academic and Social Democratic politician; Tartu City Council member since 2017; Member of the European Parliament (2014-2017) for the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats; Member of the Estonian Parliament (1992-2014); Estonian Minister of Social Affairs (1992-1994)
- April 7, 1944 – Julia Phillips born, American film producer and author; best known as co-producer of The Sting, Taxi Driver, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind; she was the first woman producer to win an Academy Award for Best Film, for The Sting. Her tell-all memoir, You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, which included her struggles with cocaine addiction, was a 1991 bestseller, and was followed in 1995 by Driving Under the Influence
- April 7, 1945 – Marilyn Friedman born, American philosopher, academic and author; currently holds the W. Alton Jones Chair of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University; it took her twenty years of teaching to gain tenure. She became focused on autonomy in the 1980s because “Many feminists thought that the moral ideal of autonomy represented male but not female modes of moral reasoning. Most people saw autonomy as a separation of self from loved ones—a kind of selfishness. I see it in terms of self-determination, and I didn’t think it had to carry specifically masculine associations.” She has also explored the nature of close interpersonal relationships, women in poverty, care and justice, partiality and impartiality, gender identity, multicultural education, and female terrorists. Noted for her books What Are Friends For? Feminist Perspectives on Personal Relationships on Moral Theory; and Autonomy, Gender, Politics. Friedman also co-edited Feminism and Community, Mind and Morals: Essays on Ethics and Cognitive Science, and Rights and Reason: Essays in Honor of Carl Wellman
- April 7, 1956 – Annika Billström born, Swedish Social Democratic politician, first woman to be Mayor of Stockholm (2002-2006); Stockholm City Councilwoman (1994-2002)
- April 7, 1957 – Thelma Walker born, British Labour politician and school administrator; Member of Parliament for Colne Valley since 2017
- April 7, 1960 – Sandy Powell born, British costume designer; nominated for Best Costume Design Oscars 14 times, winning three Academy Awards, for Shakespeare in Love, The Aviatorand The Young Victoria. She has also been nominated 15 times for BAFTA Awards, and won three times. Powell was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2011 for services to the film industry
- April 7, 1961 – Brigitte van der Burg born in Tanzania, Dutch People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy politician; Netherlands House of Representatives member (2006-2017)
- April 7, 1965 – Rosalie Hirs born, Dutch composer of contemporary classical music, and poet; noted for her compositions Book of Mirrors and Roseherte, and her poetry collections Locus, Logo and Speling
- April 7, 1965 – Alison Lapper born, English artist born with phocomelia, without arms and with shortened legs. She was institutionalized in her infancy, and after childhood rejected artificial limbs as an attempt to make her look “more normal” instead of helping her. She studied art at several colleges, then graduated with a first class honors degree in Fine Art from the Faculty of Arts and Architecture at the University of Brighton in 1994. She works in photography, digital imaging, and painting, and is a member of the Association of Mouth and Foot Painting Artists of the World (AMFPA)
- April 7, 1987 – Opening of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., the first museum devoted to women artists
- April 7, 2012 – Joyce Banda, leader of the People’s Party, becomes Malawi’s first woman President (2012-2014). After the sudden death of President Mutharika on April 5, the government delays notification of both the public and Vice President Banda. The cabinet seeks a court order to block Banda from becoming president, but the military and the public back her, demanding that the Malawian Constitution be followed
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- April 8, 1826 – Pancha Carrasco born, Costa Rican woman who volunteered in 1856 as an army cook and medic, but filled her apron pockets with bullets, grabbed a rifle and joined the defenders at the Battle of Rivas, becoming the first woman in combat in Costa Rica
- April 8, 1865 – Albion Fellows Bacon born, American author and social reformer. She founded a Working Girls’ Association, an Anti-Tuberculosis League, and a Monday Night Club of influential citizens interested in charitable work. Believing substandard housing to be the cause of many social problems, Bacon drafted a model state law and organized the Indiana Housing Association, resulting in a statewide tenement law in 1913. Later she became involved with the state Commission on Child Welfare and was head of the executive committee of the Indiana Child Welfare Association, where she worked to establish a juvenile probation system and child labor and school attendance laws. In 1914, she published Beauty for Ashes, a record of her campaign to improve housing conditions
- April 8, 1905 – Helen Fennell Joseph born in Britain, South African author, social worker and activist; she served as an information and welfare officer in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force during WWII. Joseph was one of the founders of the Federation of South African Women, and one of the organizers and leaders of the march on August 9, 1956 to protest the pass laws; she was arrested and banned for protesting Apartheid multiple times
- April 8, 1917 – Winifred Asprey born, American mathematician and computer scientist; one of only about 200 women to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics from American universities during the 1940s. She was instrumental in developing the close contact between Vassar College and IBM that led to the establishment of the first computer science lab at Vassar. She graduated from Vassar College in New York state in 1938, then taught at private schools in New York and Chicago before earning her M.S. (1942) and Ph.D. (1945) from the University of Iowa. She returned to Vassar as a professor, and made contact with Grace Hopper, whom she had met as a Vassar undergraduate, and learned about computer architecture from her. Asprey taught mathematics and computer science at Vasar for 38 years, and was Chair of the mathematics department from 1957 until her retirement in 1982. Her connections and persistence made Vassar the second college in the U.S. to acquire an IBM system /360 computer in 1967
- April 8, 1924 – Atatürk’s Reforms convert the nation to the Republic of Turkey, and abolish Sharia courts, paving the way for Turkish women to achieve voting rights in local elections in 1930, and full suffrage by 1934
- April 8, 1938 – Mary W. Gray born, American mathematician, statistician, author and lawyer. She has published books and papers on mathematics, computer science, applied statistics, economic equity, discrimination law, and academic freedom. Currently on the Board of Advisers for Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED), and Board of Directors Chair for America-Mideast Educational and Training Services (AMIDEAST). Fellow of the American Mathematics Society since 2013, Fellow of the Association for Women in Mathematics since 2017, and honored in 2017 with the Karl E. Peace Award for Outstanding Statistical Contributions for the Betterment of Society
- April 8, 1943 – Dorie Cooper, aged seven, goes with her mother to hospital in Britain to visit her uncle, who had lost his right leg to a mine in WWII and was very depressed. Dorie, trying to cheer him up, asked, “Draw a bird for me, please.” Her uncle looked out the window, and saw a robin, and tried to draw it. When Dorie saw his picture, she laughed, telling him he wasn’t a very good artist, but she would hang up the picture in her room anyway. His spirits were lifted by the visit, and so were the spirits of the nearby wounded men who overheard Dorie. So every time she came to visit after that, they held contests to see who could draw the best bird pictures. Soon the ward’s walls were covered in bird drawings. Three years later, Dorie was killed when she was struck by a car. At her funeral, her coffin was filled with bird images made by soldiers, nurses and doctors from the ward she visited so often. Draw a Bird Day * is celebrated on Dorie’s birthday in memory of a little girl who found such a simple way to bring hope and cheer to wounded men
- April 8, 1955 – Barbara Kingsolver born, American novelist, essayist and poet; The Poisonwood Bible, The Bean Trees, and Pigs in Heaven; awarded a National Humanities Medal in 2000, and the 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction for Lacuna
- April 8, 1970 – The Senate votes on President Richard Nixon’s nomination of G. Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court; a combination of the high-reversal rate (58%) of his decisions on appeal, his support decades earlier of racial segregation and white supremacy, and his poor record on women’s rights all cause his nomination to be rejected 51-45; 38 Democrats and 13 Republicans vote against him – Nixon then nominates Judge Harry Blackmun, who will author the decision in Roe v. Wade, and he’s confirmed in a 94-0 vote
- April 8, 1970 – Care Santos born as Macarena Santos i Torres, Spanish-Catalan author in both Catalan and Spanish; noted for her 2007 novel La muerte de Venus (The Death of Venus), which has been translated into several languages
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- April 9, 1634 – Albertine Agnes of Nassau born, after her husband’s death in 1664, she became regent for her son, Henry Casimir II of Nassau-Dietz, then only 7 years old. In 1665, both England and the bishopric of Münster declared war on the Netherlands. Most of the money for defence had been spent the fleet, while the army had been neglected. When Groningen was under siege, Albertine Agnes quickly went to the city to give moral support. Pressure by King Louis XIV of France, then an ally, forced the forces of her enemies to retreat, but six years later the Netherlands were attacked from the south, by the French under Louis XIV and from the north by the bishop of Münster and the archbishop of Cologne. She organized the defence of the stadtholdership and kept morale high. After her son reached his majority, she retired to a country seat, where she died in 1696
- April 9, 1837 – Florence Smith Price born, African-American classical composer, possibly the first black woman recognized as a symphonic composer in the United States; she left a large body of work, including compositions for orchestra, pianoforte and organ, chamber music, choral and solo vocal pieces and arrangements of spirituals
- April 9, 1860 – Emily Hobhouse born, English reformer and social worker; founder of the Distress Fund for South African Women and Children; notable for reports she sent home exposing to the British public the appalling conditions in British-run concentration camps for Boer women and children and separate camps for Black South Africans during and after the Second Boer War. Almost 27,000 women and children, and over 20,000 Black noncombatants, died of disease and starvation
- April 9, 1921 – Mary Jackson born, African American mathematician and aerospace engineer; NASA’s first black woman engineer
- April 9, 1923 – The U.S. Supreme Court rules in Adkins v Children’s Hospital that the minimum wage law for women and children in the District of Columbia is unconstitutional. Congress had passed laws to limit child labor in 1916 and 1918, but the Supreme Court had also declared them to be unconstitutional. In the 1920s, American women on average earned 20% of what men earned, mostly because men had a nearly universal monopoly on the jobs which paid better
- April 9, 1929 – Paule Marshall born Valenza Pauline Burke, American author and poet, best known for her novel Brown Girl, Brownstones; went with Langston Hughes on a State Department-sponsored world cultural tour in 1965
- April 9, 1939 – On Easter Sunday, over 75,000 people gather on the Mall in Washington DC to hear famed contralto Marian Anderson give a free concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Anderson had originally been engaged to give a concert at Washington DC’s Constitution Hall, managed by the Daughters of the American Revolution. When the DAR refuses to allow a black woman to perform there, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt resigns her DAR membership in protest, and writes about it on her newspaper column. Thousands more hear Anderson’s concert in a live national radio broadcast, and the story raises awareness of racial discrimination in America
- April 9, 1937 – Valerie Singleton born, English broadcast presenter; she was a continuity announcer for the BBC beginning in 1961, and also worked on several BBC radio programmes; in 1962, she joined Blue Peter, a popular BBCC children’s programme, and was a regular on the show until 1972, then played a part-time role on the show until 1975, while working from 1973 until 1978 on the current affairs programme Nationwide
- April 9, 1946 – Sara Parkin born, Scottish politician, originally with the UK Green Party (1976-1992), as a savvy policy instigator and frequent spokesperson for the party, but resigned in 1992 over leadership issues within the party; co-founded the Forum for the Future, a sustainable development charity, currently involved with spreading sustainability education and literacy
- April 9, 1948 – Jaya Bhaduri Bachchan born, Indian actress and Samajwadi (Socialist Party) politician, member of India’s upper house of Parliament since 2004. In 1992, she was awarded the Padma Shri, India’s fourth highest civilian honor
- April 9, 1955 – Yamina Benguigui born, French film director and Socialist Party politician of Algerian descent; her father, a leader in the Algerian National Movement, became a political prisoner, but his opposition to her chosen profession led to an estrangement; she is known for films on gender issues in the North African immigrant community in France; Femmes d’Islam, Mémoires d’immigrés, l’héritage maghrébin; elected to the Paris city council representing the 20th arrondissement in 2008, and appointed as Junior Minister for French Nationals Abroad and Relations with La Francophonie (French-speaking countries worldwide) at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2012; appointed as the French President’s representative for the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (OIF)
- April 9, 1964 – Margaret Peterson Haddix born, American author of over 30 books for children and young adults; noted for her series, The Missing, and Shadow Children
- April 9, 1966 – Cynthia Nixon born, American stage, film and television actress, activist and candidate for public office; best known for the television series, Sex and the City (1998-2004); advocate for LGBT rights, especially same-sex marriage; ran in the 2018 Democratic primaries for Governor of New York, on a platform which addressed income inequality, establishing universal health care, renewable energy, and stopping mass incarceration. She lost to incumbent Andrew Cuomo, getting 34% of the vote to his 66%
- April 9, 1967 – Natascha Engel born in West Germany, British Labour politician and linguist; first UK Commissioner for Shale Gas (Fracking), appointed in 2018 by the Conservative government; Deputy Chair of Ways and Means (2015-2017); Member of Parliament for North East Derbyshire (2005-2017)
- April 9, 1972 – Siiri Vallner born, Estonian architect; noted for the Museum of Occupations in Tallinn, the sports hall of Lasnamäe, and the central sports hall of Pärnu. Member of the Union of Estonian Architects
- April 9, 1980 – Sarah Ayton born, English sailor; she won gold medals in the Yngling sailing class in the 2004 and 2008 Summer Olympics, and won the Ynling World Championships in 2007 and 2008. At age 14, in 1995 she battled meningococcal meningitis and septicaemia. Ayton is a patron of Meningitis Now UK, funding medical research and public awareness
- April 9, 1989 – The March for Women’s Lives, a march initiated by the National Organization for Women, assembles 500,000 women in the nation’s capital to protest anti-abortion law cases pending in the Supreme Court which threaten reversal of the landmark Roe v Wade decision that legalized abortion
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- April 10, 1864 – Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, the first female surgeon of the Union Army and an unpaid volunteer, is captured by Confederate troops after crossing enemy lines to treat the wounded from both armies, and arrested as a spy. She was working with a Confederate doctor performing an amputation at the time. Sent to the notorious Castle Thunder Prison for political prisoners and spies, the feminist and ardent adherent to rational dress for women, refused to wear the clothes provided as “more becoming of her sex” instead of her work clothes, made over from a man’s shirt and trousers (She often replied to criticism, “I don’t wear men’s clothes, I wear my own clothes.”) Walker was released in a prisoner exchange for a Confederate doctor in August, 1864. After the war, Walker was awarded a disability pension for partial muscular atrophy suffered while she was imprisoned by the enemy, and Generals William Tecumseh Sherman and George Henry Thomas recommended her for the Medal of Honor, which originally was not strictly a military honor. On November 11, 1865, President Andrew Johnson signed the bill awarding her the medal, the only woman ever to receive the Medal of Honor. It was stricken from the rolls in 1917, and she was ordered to surrender it, but she wore it until her death in 1919, and President Jimmy Carter restored her medal posthumously in 1977
- April 10, 1880 – Frances Perkins born, sociologist, worker-rights and industrial safety advocate; first woman appointed to U.S. cabinet, by FDR, as Secretary of Labor (1933-1945)
- April 10, 1926 – Johnnie Tillmon born, director of the National Welfare Rights Organization (1963-1972), worked with Gloria Steinem and Aileen Hernandez on “Women, Welfare and Poverty” at the National Women’s Conference in Houston (1977)
- April 10, 1930 – Dolores Huerta born, American labor, civil rights and women’s rights activist, co-founder of the United Farm Workers with César Chávez; Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights and Presidential Medal of Freedom; became the founder and president of the Dolores Huerta Foundation in 2002, to create opportunities for community leadership and grassroots campaigns; Huerta was the first Latina to be inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1993
- April 10, 1937 – Bella Akhmadulina born, Russian poet, author and translator; 1994 Pushkin Prize; Casket and Key, Izbrannoye (Selected Verse)
- April 10, 1956 – Dame Carol V. Robinson born, British chemist, noted for research in chemical biology; since 2009, Royal Society Research Professor at the Physical and Theoretical Chemistry Laboratory at Oxford; from 2001 to 2009, Professor of Mass Spectrometry at the Department of Chemistry of Cambridge; has worked on protein folding, the three-dimensional structure of proteins, ribosomes, molecular chaperones and membrane proteins; in 2004, honored with both a Royal Society Fellowship and the Rosalind Franklin Award; in 2010, received the Davy Medal “for her ground-breaking and novel use of mass spectrometry for the characterisation of large protein complexes”
- April 10, 1961 – Carole Goble born, British computer scientist and information systems expert; Professor of Computer Science at the University of Manchester since 1985, and appointed to a chair in 2000. Known for myGrid, BioCatalogue, my Experiment, and Semantic Grid. Co-leads the Information Management Group with Norman Paton. She is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and of the British Computer Society, and an appointee to the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council
- April 10, 1963 – Doris Leuthard born, Swiss Christian Democratic People’s Party politician; third woman to be elected President of the Swiss Confederation by the Federal Assembly, a position with a one-year term (for 2010 and 2017); Vice President of Switzerland (2016-2017 and 2009); Minister of Environment, Transport, Energy and Communications (2010-2018); Minister of Economic Affairs (2006-2010); fifth woman to be a Member of the Swiss Federal Council (2006-2018)
- April 10, 1977 – Stephanie Sheh born, also uses the alias Jennifer Sekiguchi, American ADR writer, producer, director and voice actress in Anime, cartoons, video games and films. In 2011, she formed the fundraising organization We Heart Japan in response to the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami
- April 10, 1979 – Rachel Corrie born, American peace activist and diarist; member of the International Solidarity Movement. In 2003, she was killed in Rafah, in the Gaza Strip, by an Israel Defense Forces armored bulldozer while trying to block the demolition of a Palestinian house. An Israeli investigation of her death concluded the driver of the bulldozer could not see her, so her death was an accident; other members of the International Solidarity Movement who were there say he ran over her deliberately. In 2005, her parents filed a civil lawsuit against the state of Israel, charging Israel with not conducting a full and credible investigation into the case and with responsibility for her death, asking a symbolic one U.S. dollar in damages. An Israeli court rejected their suit in 2012, upholding the findings of the 2003 military investigation. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch were critical of the court’s ruling. Her writings and emails to her parents were published in 2008 as a book, Let Me Stand Alone
- April 10, 1996 – The National Committee on Pay Equity launches National Equal Pay Day which is set on the day in the year when an American woman’s pay would finally catch up with a man’s wages from the previous year – in other words, she has to work almost 15 ½ months to earn what he does in 12 months. For a woman of color, the gap is even wider; it will take her until August to earn what a man does
- April 10, 1996 – President Clinton vetoes a bill that would have outlawed a technique used to end pregnancies in their late stages
- April 10, 2001 – Jane Swift sworn in as 1st female governor of Massachusetts
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- April 11, 1864 – Johanna Elberskirchen born, German feminist author and activist for rights of women, gays and lesbians, and blue-collar workers; publishes books on women’s health and sexuality; her last public appearance is at the 1930 World League for Sexual Reform conference in Vienna; in 1933, the Nazi Party comes to power and her activities end; when she dies in 1943, there is no public record of her funeral
- April 11, 1881 – The Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary, which becomes Spelman College, is founded in Atlanta, Georgia, as an institute of higher education for African-American women. Received its collegiate charter in 1924
- April 11, 1903 – Misuzu Kaneko born, Japanese children’s poet and songwriter; her widowed mother ran a bookstore and insisted on her daughter continuing her education until the age of 17, even though most girls of the time only went to school up to the sixth grade. At the bookstore, Kaneko discovered some magazines for children were soliciting stories and verse, and sent in several of her poems. Five of them were published in 1923. Over the next 5 years, 51 of her poems were published. But her marriage to a clerk in the bookstore was not a happy one. He was unfaithful, contracted venereal disease which he passed on to her, and he forced her to stop writing. When she finally divorced him, Japanese law automatically gave indisputable custody of their daughter to the father. She sank into despair. After writing a letter to her former husband begging him to let her mother raise the girl, she committed suicide just before her 27th birthday in 1930. Ultimately, her mother did raise her daughter. Her work fell into obscurity during WWII. In 1966, Setsuo Yazaki, an aspiring poet, found her poem ‘Big Catch’ in an out-of-print book, and spent the next 16 years trying to track down the poet. In 1982, he finally got in touch with Kaneko’s younger brother, who still had the diaries in which his sister had written her poems. The entire collection was published in a six volume anthology. In 2016, an English-language translation of selected poems, Are You an Echo? The Lost Poetry of Misuzu Kaneko, was published
- April 11, 1908 – Jane Bolin born, American lawyer and judge, first black American woman to graduate from Yale Law School, the first to join the NYC Bar Association and the NYC Law Department, and the first African-American woman judge in the U.S.
- April 11, 1913 – The pavilion at Nevill Ground, a cricket venue in Kent, England, is burned down by militant suffragettes, who leave behind suffragette literature to claim responsibility. Nevill Ground was chosen as a target because of their no-admittance to women policy
- April 11, 1914 – Dorothy Lewis Bernstein born, American mathematician who worked centered on applied mathematics, statistics, and computer programming; she also did research on the Laplace transform; first woman to be elected president of the Mathematics Association of America (1979-1980)
- April 11, 1914 – Sally Hoyt Spofford born, American ornithologist, conservationist and writer; noted for her work at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology (1955-1969). After retirement, she and her husband, ornithologist Walter Spofford, moved to Portal, Arizona, where their ranch attracted up to 6,000 bird watchers a year
- April 11, 1916 – Annie Besant, British feminist, activist and Fabian Society member; establishes the Home Rule League in India, campaigning for democracy and British Empire dominion status
- April 11, 1925 – Viola Gregg Liuzzo born, American Unitarian Universalist civil rights activist and member of the NAACP, answers the call of Martin Luther King Jr., and goes to Selma Alabama after Bloody Sunday in 1965, marching from Selma to Montgomery, helping with coordination and logistics. Driving back from taking other activists to the Montgomery airport, she is murdered, shot to death by Ku Klux Klansmen firing from a car that pulled alongside, which was also carrying FBI informant Gary Thomas Rowe. He testifies against the shooters, leading to their conviction. Rowe is given a pass by the FBI for actively participating in violence, sometimes even inciting it, against Civil Rights activists from 1961 until 1965, when he goes into the witness protection program. The FBI launches a smear campaign against Liuzzo after her death, falsely claiming she was a Communist Party member, a heroin addict, and had abandoned her children to have sex with black men in the Civil Rights movement, as part of their attempt to discredit Dr. King and the whole Civil Rights Movement
- April 11, 1937 – Jill Gascoine born, British novelist, theatrical and television actress; noted for her novels Addicted, Lilian and Just Like a Woman. In 2013, she announced at a Beverly Hills fundraiser for Alzheimer’s that she had been diagnosed with the disease. Her husband, actor Alfred Molina, reported in 2016 that she was in a very advanced stage of Alzheimer’s and was in a specialist care home
- April 11,1938 – Reatha Clark King born, African-American chemist and corporate executive; Executive Director/Board Chair of the General Mills Foundation (1988-2003); Professor of Chemistry at City University of New York (1968-1977); research chemist for the National Bureau of Standards (1962-1967), the first black woman chemist hired by the bureau
- April 11,1941 – Ellen Goodman born, American journalist, syndicated columnist and author; won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary; co-founder and director of The Conversation Project, which helps people talk to their loved ones about what kind of end-of-life care they want before the time when decisions must be made
- April 11, 2012 – New polls show Republican Senator Scott Brown and Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren “running neck-and-neck” in the Massachusetts U.S. Senate race. In one telephone survey, Warren polled at 46 percent and Brown at 45 percent. In November, 2012, Warren would win with 53.7% of the vote, compared to Brown’s 46.2%
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- April 12, 1883 – Imogen Cunningham born, American photographer; famous for botanical photos, nudes and industrial landscapes
- April 12, 1908 – Ida Pollock born, English author of short stories and romance novels, and painter in oils, who was selected for inclusion in a national exhibition in 2004; in a 90 year writing career under ten pseudonyms, she sold millions of books; she was still writing up to the last year of her life, and lived to be 105 years old
- April 12, 1916 – Beverly Cleary born, American author, 1981 National Book Award for Children’s Books, for Ramona and Her Mother, and 3-time ALA Newbery Medal winner
- April 12, 1925 – Evelyn Berezin born, American computer designer; noted for designing the first computer-driven word processor, the first computer-controlled system for airline reservations, the first computerized banking system, and a system for range calculations for the U.S Army; 2015 Computer History Museum Fellow Award honoree
- April 12,1933 – Montserrat Caballé born, Spanish bel canto soprano; her “Barcelona” duet with Queen’s Freddie Mercury later becomes the theme song of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics
- April 12,1943 – Sumitra Mahajan born, Indian Bharatiya Janata Party politician; Speaker of the Lok Sabha (lower house of India’s Parliament) since 2014; Member of Parliament, Lok Sabha, for Indore since 1989; first Indian woman to represent the same Lok Sabha constituency for the same party ticket eight times in a row
- April 12,1944 – Lisa Jardine born, British historian; studied both Mathematics and English at university; fluent in eight languages including Ancient Greek and Latin, and wrote on everything from Shakespeare and Francis Bacon to feminist theory and the history of science; Professor of Renaissance Studies at University College, London (1990-2011), also Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Humanities and Director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters; Fellow of the Royal Historical Society; Fellow and Honorary Fellow of King’s College and Jesus College, Cambridge; President of the Antiquarian Horological Society; publications include Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse and Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare; her book Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory, about how Dutch thinkers and scientists influenced England’s intellectual landscape in the 17th century, won 2009 Cundill International Prize in History
- April 12,1950 – Joyce Banda born, Malawian politician and grassroots women’s rights activist; first woman President of Malawi (2012-2014), taking over after the sudden death of President Bingu wa Mutharika; first woman Vice-President of Malawi (2009-2012); Minister of Foreign Affairs (2006-2009); founder and leader of the People’s Party in 2011
- April 12,1957 – Tama Janowitz born, American novelist and short story writer; noted for Slaves of New York, a short story collection, and Scream: A Memoir of Glamour and Dysfunction
- April 12, 1963 – Lydia Cacho born, Mexican investigative journalist, feminist and human rights activist; her 2004 book, Los Demonios del Edén (The Demons of Eden), alleging that prominent businessmen in Puebla conspired to protect a pedophilia ring, caused a national scandal. After publication, she was arrested in Cancun by Puebla police and driven back to Puebla, 900 miles away, verbally abused and threatened with rape en route, but later released on bail; in 2006, a tape came to light of telephone conversations from shortly before her arrest between the governor of Puebla, Mario Marin, and businessman Kamel Borge about having Cacho beaten and raped to silence her. She took the case of her arrest all the way to the Supreme Court of Mexico, the first woman to testify before the court, but the justices ruled 6-4 in 2007 that there was no case for Governor Marin to answer. In 2008, she was almost killed a few days before the trial of the central figure in the pedophile ring, Jean Succar Kuri, when the lugnuts on one of her car’s wheels were loosened. Kuri was convicted, and sentenced to 112 years in prison. Cacho also reported in 2006 on hundreds of women missing or murdered in Ciudad Juarez. She is the winner of the Civil Courage Prize, the Wallenberg Medal, and the Olof Palme Prize, and named a 2010 World Press Freedom Hero by the International Press Institute
- April 12, 2016 – Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality Monument Day – the National Woman’s Party (NWP), founded by Alice Paul, bought the Sewall House in 1929 as their Washington DC headquarters, renaming it the Alva Belmont House in honor of the NWP former president – on this day, U.S. President Barack Obama designates the establishment of the house as the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument, a unit of the National Park System
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- April 13, 1648 – Jeanne Marie Bouvier de la Motte Guyon born, French mystic and author, accused of heresy and imprisoned (1695-1703) for publishing her book, Moyen court et facile de faire oraison (A Short and Very Easy Method of Prayer) which advocated silent prayer, the intellectual stillness of meditation, over vocal prayer, and was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (the Roman Catholic list of prohibited books, which was finally abolished in 1966 by Pope Paul VI)
- April 13, 1828 – Josephine Butler born, English feminist, social reformer and author; campaigned for women’s suffrage, better education and employment opportunities for women, and against the legal doctrine of coverture, in which a woman’s legal rights and obligations are subsumed by those of her husband, reducing her to his legal appendage – Butler was a key player in the passage of the Married Women’s Property Act 1882; also advocated for an end to sex trafficking of women and children, especially child prostitution, and an end to the Contagious Diseases Acts, which legalized the forced medical examination of prostitutes, but not their clients; founded the International Abolitionist Federation, to fight international sex trafficking and oppose regulations which violated women’s rights
- April 13, 1854 – Lucy Craft Laney born, American educator, founder and principal of Haines Normal and Industrial School, the first school for black children in Augusta, GA, beginning with 6 students, but expanding to 234 students by the end of the school’s second year – Laney named the school for Francine Haines, who donated $10,000 for its expansion
- April 13, 1891 – Nella Larsen born, daughter of an Afro-Caribbean father from the Danish West Indies and a Danish immigrant mother, which alienated her from both the white and black cultures of the U.S. In 1915, Larsen got a nursing degree and worked at the Tuskegee Institute’s hospital, NYC’s Lincoln Hospital, and then for the NY Bureau of Public Health. Her 1919 marriage to Elmer Imes, a pioneering black physicist, ended in divorce. In 1923, she became the first black woman to graduate from the New York Public Library School at Columbia University; considered a Harlem Renaissance author, she published her first novel, Quicksand, in 1928, and Passing in 1929; she also published several short stories, but after her divorce in 1933, she was depressed and stopped writing, disappearing from literary circles. When her ex-husband died in 1942, ending his alimony payments, she returned to nursing
- April 13, 1900 – Sorcha Boru born as Claire Jones, American potter and ceramic sculptor, mostly known on the West Coast, where many of her works are held by the Oakland Museum and the Everson Museum of Art; she lived to the age of 105
- April 13, 1909 – Eudora Welty born, author, photographer, won Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1973) for The Optimist's Daughter. Immediately after the murder of Medgar Evers in 1963, Welty wrote a fictional story in the voice of the then-unknown murderer called Where Is the Voice Coming From? Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Literature, and the French Legion d’Honneur
- April 13, 1919 – Madalyn Murray O’Hair born, American activist, author, she was behind the 1962 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that organized Bible reading in public schools was unconstitutional. The founder and first president of American Atheists; Why I Am an Atheist
- April 13, 1927 – Rosemary Haughton born, Roman Catholic lay theologian and author; noted for The Passionate God; The Tower That Fell; Song in a Strange Land; Tales from Eternity; and The Re-Creation of Eve
- April 13, 1940 – Ruby Puryear Hearn born, African-American biophysicist who has worked on development of health improvement programs for at-risk children, maternal and infant care, AIDS prevention, substance abuse and minority medical education; Senior Vice President of the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation (1983-2001), since retiring, acts as Senior Vice President Emerita
- April 13, 1944 – Susan Davis born, American Democratic politician, serving in the U.S. House of Representatives, for the 49th District (2001- 2003) and since 2003 for the reconfigured 53rd District; California State Assembly (1994-2001), chair of Committee on Consumer Protection; author of legislation expanding patients’ rights, for state-funded at-home nursing care for seniors, rewards for high-achieving teachers, and funding for after-school programs at public schools, but has a mixed record in the U.S. Congress, voting for expanding government and military rights to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens and others without trial
- April 13, 1947 – Rae Armantrout born, American poet; winner of the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award, and the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection, Versed
- April 13, 1952 – Gabrielle Gourdeau born, French Canadian writer; contributor to the newspapers La Presse, Le Devoir and Le Soleil, and the cultural magazine Arcade
- April 13, 1957 – Amy Goodman born, American broadcast journalist, syndicated columnist and investigative reporter; host of Democracy Now! since 1996; recipient of the 2004 Thomas Merton Award, and the 2012 Gandhi Peace Award; criminal charges in connection with her television coverage of protests of the Dakota Access pipeline, which showed security personnel using pepper spray and attack dogs on the protesters, were eventually dismissed
- April 13, 1980 – Colleen Clinkenbeard born, American ADR director, line producer, voice actress and script writer at Funimation, which dies English language versions of Japanese anime series
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- April 14, 1819 – Harriet Grannis Arey born, American author, editor and publisher, who used the pen name Mrs. H. E. G. Arey; she was one of the few girls of her era to study in a co-educational environment. She became a contributor to the Daily Herald in Cleveland, Ohio, then after her marriage moved to Wisconsin, where she was the Preceptress and Teacher of English Literature, French, and Drawing" at State Normal School in Whitewater. When she returned to Cleveland, she edited a month publication devoted to charitable work, and was co-founder and first president of the Ohio Woman’s State Press Association. Noted for Household Songs and Other Poems
- April 14, 1886 – Maggie Laubser born, South African painter; her first exhibition in South Africa, after years of study and working in Europe, was met with harsh criticism, but by the 1940s, her work was earning awards; she became a member of the South African Academy for Arts and Science in 1948
- April 14, 1905 – Elizabeth Paisley Huckaby born, American educator; as Vice Principal for Girls at Little Rock Central High School in 1957 when nine black students, six of them girls, were admitted to the school after desegregation, she was responsible for protecting the girls; in 1958, Governor Orval Faubus closed all the public schools to resist desegration, and after a year of paying teachers. who were under contract, to sit in empty schools, three members of the Little Rock School Board declared themselves a majority and fired dozens of teachers and administrators, including Huckaby; but the board members were voted out of office, and those who had been fired were reinstated. Author of Crisis at Central High: Little Rock 1957–58, published after her retirement in 1980, based on the diary she kept during the crisis
- April 14, 1919 – K. Saraswathi Amma born, Malayalam-language feminist writer from the state of Kerala in India, whose short stories, essays and a novel were radically anti-patriarchy, so she was dismissed in her time as “an incorrigible man-hater” but has since been re-discovered and celebrated by feminist scholars
- April 14, 1954 – Sue Hill born, English healthcare scientist and specialist in respiratory medicine, PhD in pulmonary pathophysiology, Dame of the British Empire (2018), and Chief Scientific Officer for England since 2002; worked on initiatives for the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), including leading the development of UK National Occupational Standards for healthcare science. She is Vice-President of the British Lung Foundation, and co-founder with Robert Stockley of the biennial COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) international conference
- April 14, 1960 – Tina Rosenberg born, American journalist and non-fiction author; New York Times writer and columnist, and frequent contributor to The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and The New Republic; co-founder with David Bornstein and Courtney Martin of the Solutions Journalism Network in 2013. Her book, The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism, won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and the 1995 National Book Award for Nonfiction
- April 14, 1981 – Amy Leach born, British theatre director; co-founder of the En Masse theatre company; her productions of The Echo Chamber and The Ignatius Trail won Fringe First Awards at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2003 and 2004
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- April 15, 1892 – Corrie ten Boom born, Dutch watchmaker; after the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands, she and her family began helping Jews escape the Nazi holocaust, starting with their neighbors; betrayed in 1944 by a Dutch informant, the family was arrested and sent to prison, but the six people in hiding at their house were undiscovered, and managed to escape undetected; many of her family members died in prison, but she survived, and wrote the best-selling book The Hiding Place, helped set up refugee housing for holocaust survivors, and became a public speaker
- April 15, 1894 – Bessie Smith born, notable American blues singer, “Empress of the Blues”
- April 15, 1895 – Abigaíl Mejía Soliére born, Dominican Republic teacher, pioneering feminist activist and nationalist; co-founder with Delia Weber of the Acción Feminista movement in 1927 to gain educational opportunities for poor Dominican women, campaign for women’s suffrage (achieved in 1942), and work for social issues such as penal reform, and against drug and alcohol abuse and forced prostitution
- April 15, 1896 – May Edward Chinn, first black woman to graduate from Bellevue Hospital Medical College (1926) and the 1st woman doctor in Harlem (1936-80), worked with George Papanicolaon on the Pap smear to identify cervical cancer. Kuwana Haulsey wrote “Angel of Harlem,” a novel based on her life (2004)
- April 15, 1915 – Elizabeth Catlett born, black American sculptor and illustrator
- April 15, 1916 – Helene Hanff born, American author and screenwriter; best known for her book 84, Charing Cross Road
- April 15, 1928 – Norma Merrick Sklarek born, American architect, first African American woman architect licensed in New York and California, first to be elected Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, first to form her own architectural firm
- April 15, 1930 – Vigdís Finnbogadóttir born, world’s first democratically elected and longest-serving woman president, fourth President of Iceland (1980-1996)
- April 15, 1947 – Linda Bloodworth-Thomason born, American screenwriter and television producer; co-founder of Mozark Productions; notable for creating, writing and producing the hit series Designing Women (1986-1993); produced and directed campaign films for both Bill and Hillary Clinton
- April 15, 1959 – Emma Thompson born, British actor, author, screenwriter; nominated for five Academy Awards, and won Best Actress for Howard’s End and Best Adapted Screenplay for Sense and Sensibility; human rights and environmental activist, who has traveled in Africa as an ambassador for the charity Action Aid, and is chair of the Helen Bamber Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, and a patron of the Refugee Council
- April 15, 1960 – Ella Baker leads a conference at Shaw University in North Carolina where SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee is founded, a principal organization of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s
- April 15, 1960 – Susanne Bier born, Danish film director; best known for her feature films Brothers, After the Wedding, In a Better World, and Bird Box, and the British television series, The Night Manager
- April 15, 1961 – Carol W. Greider born, American molecular biologist; Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, Daniel Nathans Professor, and Director of Molecular Biology and Genetics at Johns Hopkins University. Greider discovered the enzyme telomerase in 1984. Awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize, with Elizabeth Blackburn and Jack W. Szostak, for their discovery that telomeres (the caps at the end of each strand of DNA that protect our chromosomes) are protected from progressive shortening through wear by the enzyme telomerase
- April 15, 1961 – Dawn J. Wright born, American geographer and oceanographer, a leading authority in the application of geographic information system (GIS) technology to the field of ocean and coastal science, and played a key role in creating the first GIS data model for the oceans. Wright is Chief Scientist of the Environmental Systems Research Institute (aka Esri); professor of geography and oceanography at Oregon State University since 1995. First African American woman to dive to the ocean floor in the deep submersible ALVIN
- April 15, 1962 – Nawal El Moutawakel born, Moroccan politician and Olympian; Moroccan Minister of Sports (2007-2009) Secretary for Youth and Sport (1997-1998); won the inaugural women’s 400 metres hurdles at the 1984 Summer Olympics, becoming the first Muslim woman born on the continent of Africa to be an Olympic champion, and the first Moroccan to win an Olympic gold medal. Founding member and president of the Moroccan Sport and Development Association since 2002
- April 15, 1969 – Kaisa Roose born, Estonian conductor and pianist; noted for conducting all of the Danish regional orchestras, and orchestras in Sweden, Finland, Italy and Costa Rica
- April 15, 1975 – Sarah Teichmann born, German biophysicist and immunologist; Head of Cellular Genetics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute; visiting research group leader at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI); a Director of Research (equivalent to Professor) in the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, and a Senior Research Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge. Noted for her studies of gene expression, protein complex assembly, patterns in protein interactions and transcriptional regulatory networks. Teichmann has received a number of awards, including the 2010 Colworth Medal from the Biochemical Society, and in 2012, the Francis Crick Medal and Lecture, membership inthe European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), and the Lister Prize from the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine. In 2015, she won the Michael and Kate Bárány Award, presented by the Biophysical Society, and was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences
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Sources
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