Welcome to WOW2! (the SECOND Part)
WOW2 is a thrice-monthly sister blog to This Week in the War on Women. This PART TWO of Early September 2020, which covers women and events from September 10 through September 11.
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- September 10,1758 – Hannah Webster Foster born, American novelist and advocate for women’s education; her best-seller is The Coquette, or a History of Eliza Wharton, a fictionalized version of the true story of Elizabeth Whitman, a young woman seduced by an unidentified suitor, who died after the still-born birth of her illegitimate child.
- September 10, 1793 – Harriet Arbuthnot born, English diarist, social observer and Tory party political hostess; maintained a long intimate relationship and correspondence with the Duke of Wellington, and recorded details of their conversations in her diaries, which are now a key source for historians of the Regency and late Napoleonic eras, and for biographers of the Duke of Wellington. Her diaries were published in 1950 as The Journal of Mrs. Arbuthnot.
- September 10,1801 – Marie Laveau the elder born, Voodoo Queen of New Orleans, a free woman of color, with African, Native American, and French in her ancestry.
- September 10, 1852 – Alice Brown Davis born, first woman to be chief of the Seminole Tribe of Oklahoma; postmistress, business owner, Superintendent of the Seminole Nation’s school for girls.
- September 10, 1860 – Marianne von Werefkin born as Marianna Wladimirowna Werewkina; Russian-Swiss expressionist painter, notable salon host, and co-founder of artist groups in Munich and Zurich.
- September 10, 1870 – Lilian S. Gibbs born, English botanist; educated at Swanley Horticultural College and in botany at the Royal College of Science. She organized botanical expeditions to some of the most remote places on Earth, including South Rhodesia in 1905, then Fiji, New Zealand, Queensland and Tasmania in 1907. In 1910, she became the first woman known to reach the summit of Mount Kinabulu in Borneo, and contributed over 1,000 botanical specimens from that trip to the British Museum. Bambusa gibbsiae (Miss Gibbs's bamboo) is named for her. In 1912, she made a botanical trip to Iceland, and in 1913, to the East Indies and Dutch New Guinea.
- September 10,1877 – Katherine S. Dreier born, artist, art patron, social reformer, and suffragist; co-founder with Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray of the Société Anonyme, the first major U.S. collection of modern art and sponsor of numerous exhibitions; her estate donated 28 works by important modern artists to the Guggenheim Foundation.
- September 10, 1882 – Flora ‘Fola’ Dodge La Follette born, woman’s suffrage and labor activist; her parents were Robert and Belle La Follette; contributing editor to La Follette’s Weekly Magazine.
- September 10, 1886 – ‘H.D.’ born as Hilda Dolittle, American poet and novelist, known for avant-garde poetry, literary editor of The Egoist journal during WWI, frequently uses Greek mythology and insights from psychoanalysis in her work. She has become an icon for feminists and the LGBTQ Community.
- September 10, 1890 – Rose Finkelstein Norwood born in Russia, American labor organizer and powerful speaker in the Boston area. As a child in East Cambridge, Rose was bullied by Irish-American teens who yelled "Christ Killer" and threw bricks at her as she walked to school. During one attack she suffered a serious head wound, and one of the attackers was sent to prison. The family was forced to move to a less hostile neighborhood. She led labor campaigns for telephone operators, garment and jewelry workers, boiler makers, library staffers, teachers, sales clerks, and laundry workers. When she organized workers at the Boston Public Library, it inspired her to start the Books for Workers program, in which public libraries provided books to union halls and factories. She was active in many labor and civil rights organizations, including the Boston Women's Trade Union League, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She served on the NAACP advisory board. Norwood was a vocal opponent of racism, fascism, and anti-Semitism; lifelong supporter of women's rights and workers' education, and an advocate for the elderly. She was married to Hyman Norwood for 58 years, before her death from a heart attack just after her 90th birthday in 1980.
- September 10, 1898 – Elsa Schiaparelli born, Italian fashion designer, one of the most prominent designers between the World Wars, along with her biggest rival, Coco Chanel. She popularized ‘Shocking Pink’ which became a signature color for her.
- September 10, 1907 – Dorothy Hill born, Australian geologist and palaeontologist; first woman professor at an Australian university, and first woman president of the Australian Academy of Science; she graduated in 1928 from the University of Queensland, with a First Class Honours degree in Geology, and the University’s Gold Medal for Outstanding Merit, then got her Masters of Science in 1930. Since Australian universities didn’t begin awarding PhDs until 1948, she went to Cambridge University in Great Britain. She was a Fellow of Newnham College and the Sedgwick Museum, and was supported by a series for fellowships and scholarships which enabled her to continue at Cambridge until 1936. Notable for her studies of the limestone coral faunas of Australia, using them to outline wide-ranging stratigraphy, and of the first core drills of the Great Barrier Reef. After WWII, she served as the secretary of the Great Barrier Reef Committee, raising money and arranging for building materials for the Heron Island Research Station. She was editor of The Journal of the Geological Society of Australia (1958-1964), and became the first woman President of the Professorial Board of the University of Queensland (1971- 1972); author of over 100 research papers, and the comprehensive Bibliography and Index of Australian Paleozoic Coral. She was a strong advocate for more women entering scientific fields.
- September 10, 1926 – Beryl Cook born, self-taught British painter, OBE, noted for paintings of people enjoying themselves.
- September 10,1931 – Isabel Colegate born, British literary agent and author, noted for her 1980 novel, The Shooting Party, adapted as a 1985 motion picture of the same name.
- September 10, 1935 – Mary Oliver, prolific American poet and author. She won 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for American Primitive, and her collection, New and Selected Poems, won the 1992 National Book Award for Poetry. Among her many books are Dream Work, House of Light, and Blue Horses.
- September 10, 1946 – Michèle Alliot-Marie born, French lawyer and politician, Member of the European Parliament for France since 2014; French Minister of Foreign and European Affairs (2010-2011); French Minister of Justice (2009-2010); Minister of the Interior (2007-2009); Minister of Defense (2002-2007); Member of the National Assembly for Pyrénées-Atlantiques (1978-2004).
- September 10, 1948 – Margaret Trudeau born, Canadian author; the first woman who was both the wife of a prime minister, her former husband Pierre Trudeau, and the mother of a prime minister, Justin Trudeau, in office since 2015. In 2006, she announced she has bipolar disorder, and has become an advocate for eliminating the social stigma of mental disorders. She served as honorary president of WaterAid Canada, an Ottawa-based organization dedicated to helping the poorest communities in developing countries build sustainable water supply and sanitation service (2002-2017.) Noted for her books, Beyond Reason and Changing My Mind.
- September 10, 1950 – Babette Cole born, English children’s book author and illustrator; she has created over 150 picture books, and is noted for Doctor Dog, Drop Dead, and Nungu and the Hippopotamus.
- September 10, 1951 – Sarah Coakley born, English Anglican systematic theologian and philosopher of religion with interdisciplinary interests, including feminist theory and the philosophy of science; Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity (2007-2018) at the University of Cambridge.
- September 10, 1952 – Medea Benjamin born (as Susan), American political activist; co-founder with Kevin Danaher of Code Pink: Women for Peace, and the fair trade advocacy group Global Exchange. In 2000, she was the Green Party candidate in California for U.S. Senate, and a contributor to the Huffington Post.
- September 10, 1960 – Alison Bechdel born, American cartoonist; known for the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, her graphic memoir Fun Home, and the Bechdel-Wallace Test, which she uses to call attention to gender inequality, and evaluate the portrayal of women in fiction and films, by determining if at least two women talk to each other about something other than men – the requirement that both women must be named characters is sometimes added.
- September 10, 1970 – Neera Tanden born, President of the Center for American Progress, a public policy research and advocacy organization in Washington, DC. She has served in this role since November 2011, before that serving as chief operating officer (2010-2011). She has a regular column in The New Republic.
- September 10, 1982 – Misty Copeland born, the first African American Principal Ballerina with the American Ballet Theatre. Her mother, Copeland, and her five siblings were living in two rooms in a motel when she began studying ballet at age 13, at a local Boys & Girls Club in California, then was invited to study at Cynthia Bradley’s ballet school on scholarship. Bradley had to pick her up from school because she had no other way to get to class. Within 3 months, she was en pointe. She won a scholarship at age 15, studied at the San Francisco Ballet, auditioned for American Ballet Theatre at age 17, and attended ABT’s 1999 and 2000 Summer programs. She joined the ABT Studio Company in 2001, and became a member of the Corps de ballet in 2001. By 2007, she was a soloist at ABT. Though she has had recurring stress fracture problems, including being sidelined for seven months after surgery in 2014, she has still risen with extraordinary speed from her first dance classes in 1995 to principal ballerina in a major company in 2015.
- September 10, 1996 – Walmart bans Sheryl Crow’s second album because of this lyric: “Watch out sister/Watch out brother/Watch our children as they kill each other/with a gun they bought at the Wal-Mart discount stores” in the song “Love is A Good Thing.”
- September 10, 2010 – U.S. Federal Judge Virginia Phillips rules that the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy for gays and lesbians in the U.S. military is unconstitutional, and “infringes the fundamental rights of United States service members . . .” She issues an injunction to immediately halt enforcement of the policy.
- September 10, 2019 – Black women in the U.S. are starting new businesses at six times the national average, but Black women founders have received less than one percent of venture capital deals, and received lower loan amounts at higher interest rates than other business founders. As of 2019, African-American women accounted for 50% of all women-owned businesses. But without the resources and networks necessary to grow those ventures, they find their businesses stuck at the micro level, and revenue disparity is increasing: in 2014, minority-owned businesses averaged $67,800 in revenue; by 2019 the average had dropped to $65,800, a decline of 3%. According to the annual State of Women-Owned Business Report commissioned by American Express, if revenues generated by minority women-owned firms matched those currently generated by all women-owned businesses, they would add four million new jobs and $981 billion in revenues to the U.S. economy.
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- September 11, 1318 — Eleanor of Lancaster born, she was twice married, to her first husband when she was just 13. They had one son, born in 1340, but her first husband died in 1342. She was then married in 1345 to Richard FitzAlan, 3rd Earl of Arundel, and she bore seven children, all of whom lived to adulthood. Eleanor died in 1372 at age 53. When her husband died in 1376, the instructions in his will were that he should be buried "near to the tomb of Eleanor de Lancaster, my wife; and I desire that my tomb be no higher than hers, that no men at arms, horses, hearse, or other pomp, be used at my funeral, but only five torches . . . as was about the corpse of my wife, be allowed." Their memorial effigies in Chichester Cathedral are holding hands, and inspired Philip Larkin to write the poem, “An Arundel Tomb.”
- September 11, 1476 – Louise of Savoy born, French Duchess of Nemours, Angoulême and Anjou; mother of King Francis I, serves as Regent of France in 1515, 1525-1526 and in 1529 during times when he goes to war, and while he is held prisoner in Spain; Louise is the principal French negotiator for the Treaty of Cambrai with the Holy Roman Empire, called “the Ladies’ Peace” because it is signed by Louise of Savoy and the Empire’s negotiator, Margaret of Austria.
- September 11, 1541 — Much of Santiago, Chile, is destroyed by indigenous warriors, led by the cacique (leader) Michimalonco, but Inés de Suárez rallies a counter-attack, drives the attackers off, then decapitates one of the captive caciques herself.
- September 11, 1762 – Joanna Baillie born, Scottish poet and dramatist known for Plays on the Passions (in three volumes) and Fugitive Verses. Baillie did not learn to read until age 10 when she was sent to boarding school, and the only theatrical presentation she was as a child was a puppet show. When her father died in 1778, the family’s financial situation suffered. Her aunt, Anna Home Hunter, was a poet, held a salon in her home, and was a leading Bluestocking (an educated, intellectual woman, originally a member of the Blue Stockings Society from 1720-1800, and used to describe both women and men, but came to be used only for women, and often meant to be derogatory. ‘Bas bleu’ has the same meaning in French). Baillie was introduced by her aunt to Hunter’s circle of friends, including Fanny Burney, Elizabeth Carter, Elizabeth Montagu, and Sir Walter Scott. Baillie studied playwrights and poets, then began writing her own while she ran her older brother’s household, until he married in 1791. She then lived with her mother and sister, often having to move, and exchanged letters with Walter Scott and others. She went through period of ill health in her 70s from which she recovered, then continued writing and corresponding until her death, at age 89, in 1851.
- September 11, 1806 – Juliette Magill Kinzie born, history writer, notable for including Native American legends and customs; Wau-Bun: The “Early Day” in the North West (when the ‘North West’ was Chicago).
- September 11, 1847 – Mary Watson Whitney born, astronomer; Maria Mitchell’s assistant; she became director of the Vassar Observatory (1888-1915) and professor of astronomy upon Mitchell’s retirement; like Mitchell, she was a champion for education and professional careers for women in the sciences. She and her staff published 102 papers in major astronomical journals on their work on comets, asteroids, variable stars, and using photographic plates to study and measure star clusters. By 1906, she was teaching pioneering classes in astrophysics and variable stars to 160 students. Whitney retired in 1910 at age 68 for health reasons.
- September 11, 1850 – Mary Elizabeth Lease born, American author, lecturer, fiery orator, suffragist and Populist; “Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags . . ."
- September 11, 1877 – Rosika Schwimmer born, Hungarian feminist and pacifist; organized the Association of Hungarian Women Clerks (1897), co-founder of Feministák Egyesülete (Hungarian Feminist Association – 1904), also on the board of the Hungarian Peace Society and later Vice President of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF); first Hungarian woman ambassador, to Switzerland.
- September 11, 1917 – Jessica Mitford born, British-born investigative journalist and political activist, author of The American Way of Death (1963), participated in trade-union marches.
- September 11, 1927 – Christine King Farris born, professor and author; active in the International Reading Association, the NAACP and the SCLC; sister of Martin Luther King Jr.
- September 11, 1933 – Dame Margaret Wood Booth born, British lawyer and judge; she is the third woman to be appointed as a High Court judge, in the Family Division.
- September 11, 1941 – Minnijean Brown-Trickey born, American civil rights activist, one of the ‘Little Rock Nine’ who desegregated Central High School in 1957; she was suspended for six days in December 1957 for dropping her tray in the cafeteria and splashing food on two white boys when other students were harassing her by pushing chairs in front of her in the aisle; in February 1958, two girls threw a purse filled with combination locks at her, and when she called them “white trash” she was immediately expelled. She went to Canada in the 1980s and 1990s to get degrees in social work, and became involved in First Nations activism while there. President Clinton appointed her as Deputy Assistant of the Department of the Interior for Workforce Diversity (1999-2001); among many honors, she was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal and the Wolf Award.
- September 11, 1950 – Anne Dell born, Australian biochemist; Professor of Carbohydrate Biochemistry at Imperial College London; noted for studies of glycomics and carbohydrate structures that modify proteins, which open up possible applications to learning how pathogens such as HIV are able to evade termination by the immune system, and has led to the development of higher sensitivity mass spectroscopy techniques which have allowed for the better studying of the structure of carbohydrates. Dell was awarded the 1986 Tate and Lyle Medal by the Royal Society of Chemistry, and been appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2009.
- September 11, 1953 – Jani Allan born in London, South African journalist, columnist and broadcaster; noted as one of South Africa’s most widely-read columnists in the 1980’s and 1990’s, working both in South Africa and in London, and had a radio show on Cape Talk Radio (1996-2000); was a speech writer for Mangosuthu Buthelezi (2000-2001).
- September 11, 1953 – Sarita Francis born, Monserrat civil servant and educator; currently Director of the Monserrat National Trust and the UK Overseas Territories Conservation Trust. She was the first woman appointed as deputy governor of Monserrat (2009-2011) and Acting Governor in March and April of 2011, between when the governor stepped down and his replacement arrived. Previously, she was the vice principal of the Salem Campus of the Monserrat Secondary School. In 1994, she headed the UN Development Programme in Monserrat, and began her work with the Monserrat National Trust.
- September 11,1955 – Sharon Lamb born, American psychologist and professor in the Department of Counseling and School Psychology at the University of Massachusetts Boston’s College of Education and Human Development; as a fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA), she was one of the authors of the APA’s report on the sexualization of young girls; co-author with Lyn Mikel of Packaging girlhood: rescuing our daughters from marketers’ schemes, and Packaging boyhood: saving our sons from superheroes, slackers, and other media stereotypes.
- September 11, 1960 – Annie Gosfield born, American avant-garde composer, dubbed by the BBC “A one woman Hadron collider.”
- September 11, 1961 – Samina Raja born, Pakistani Urdu poet, writer, editor, translator and broadcaster; published 12 collections of poetry between 1973 and 1995, and had also been a literary magazine editor. She died in 2012 after a long struggle with cancer.
- September 11, 1963 – Victoria Polevá born, Ukrainian composer; best known for choral works.
- September 11, 1964 – Damares Alves born, Brazilian attorney and politician; current Minister of Women, Family and Human Rights since January 2019; she is also a pastor of Foursquare Gospel Church. She worked as a legal adviser to the Brazilian National Congress from the 1990s until her 2019 ministerial appointment.
- September 11, 1970 – Taraji P. Henson born, American actress, known for her co-starring role as Detective Jocelyn Carter on CBS drama Person of Interest, and her portrayal of Katherine Johnson in the 2016 film Hidden Figures. She is a supporter of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and the NOH8 Campaign, which advocates for the LGBT community. Henson has appeared in print ads for PETA and a Public Service Announcement for NOH8.
- September 11, 2019 – In Tbilisi, Georgian women at the sixth annual conference of the Women Councillors Forum of Georgia sought a greater say in economic and political issues. Participants called for municipal public services to pay greater attention to the needs of women, such as expanding childcare options, and advocated for better vocational training opportunities to help women succeed in the labor market. The event brought together women members of local councils from all regions of Georgia, as well as representatives of the Georgian Government, Parliament, civil society, and international organizations, to discuss the opportunities arising from ongoing local governance reforms. They called for Georgian women to become more active in public life, and for gender parity at all levels of governance. “The voices of women are becoming louder at all levels of Georgia’s politics,” said Tamar Chugoshvili, First Deputy Speaker of Parliament and Chair of the Gender Equality Council. She went on to say, “The Women Councillors Forum is a powerful platform to help women play a more active role in local governance, ensuring meaningful gender equality in decision-making.”
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