WOW2 is a thrice-monthly sister blog to This Week in the War on Women. This edition covers women and events from February 21 through February 28.
The next WOW2, for Early March,
will post on Saturday, March 6.
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.
February is Black History Month, and there are a number of outstanding trailblazing black women here — from the U.S., the Caribbean and Africa, like these — their inspiring stories are included in this edition of WOW2.
THIS WEEK IN THE WAR ON WOMEN
has posted, so be sure to go there and catch up
on the latest dispatches from the frontlines:
www.dailykos.com/...
Many thanks to libera nos, intrepid Assistant Editor and STEM Researcher of WOW2. Any remaining mistakes are either mine, or uncaught computer glitches in transferring the data from his emails to DK5. And much thanks to wow2lib, WOW2’s Librarian Emeritus.
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.
Late February’s Trailblazing Women and Events in Our History
Note: All images and audios are below the person or event to which they refer
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- February 21, 1397 – Isabella of Portugal born, Duchess consort of Burgundy. At age 30, she was still unmarried, but Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, had been widowed twice, was still without an heir, and wanted a wife who would help advance his plans for an alliance with England. Isabella was also highly intelligent, shrewd, and accomplished. After protracted negotiations, they were married by proxy in 1420, but Isabella was further delayed by the assembly of a fleet to take her, her 2000-member retinue, and her extensive trousseau, to Burgundy. The fleet was beset by storms, several ships were lost with all aboard, along with most of her trousseau, but Isabella survived, and at age 33, was finally formally married in January 1430. Her first pregnancies resulted in two sons who died in infancy, but her third son, Charles the Bold, was born healthy in 1433. Isabella acted as regent of the Burgundian Low Countries during the absence of her husband in 1432 and in 1441-1443. She served as her husband's representative in negotiations with England regarding trade relations in 1439, and also with the rebellious cities of Holland in 1444. She was a generous patron of the arts, and attracted many artists and poets to the court, but also wielded political influence with both her husband and her son. She handled the negotiations for several marriages of members of the court, including the marriage of her son to Catherine of France. In 1457, she withdrew from the court because of the increasing disputes between her son and his father, and her desire for a quiet and more devout life. Her separate court at La Motte-auBois became a refuge for courtiers caught in the crossfire of Philip’s shifting alliances with England and France while he was trying to improve his powerbase. Isabella died at the advanced of age 74 in 1471.
- February 21, 1621 – Rebecca Nurse born, the first victim of the Salem witch trials in America.
- February 21, 1846 – Sarah G Bagley, the first recorded woman telegrapher, becomes superintendent of the Lowell, Massachusetts, telegraph office. After she was first hired, she had discovered she was being paid one-third less than the man she replaced. Bagley was also the organizer and president of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association, and an advocate for a 10-hour workday for mill workers.
- February 21, 1855 – Alice Freeman Palmer born, American educator who was the co-founder in 1881 (and first president) of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, which by 1884 had grown into a national organization and was renamed the American Association of University Women (AAUW). She was president of Wellesley College from 1881 to 1887, when she resigned to get married. She became a nationally known public speaker, advocating for opening college education to women, using her image as a “respected, financially independent, successful academic woman” to advance the idea of a ‘New Woman.’ She was later Dean of Women at the newly founded University of Chicago (1892-1895), where she doubled the percentage of the woman students at the school from 24% to 48%, which resulted in a backlash, mainly from male faculty members. Discouraged by the faculty and staff's response, she resigned in 1895, and resumed her career on the lecture circuit. She died in Paris in 1902, at age 47, of a heart attack, after emergency surgery to remove a bowel obstruction.
- February 21, 1866 – Lucy B. Hobbs is the first woman to graduate from dental school, the Ohio College of Dental Surgery in Cincinnati. She later became more active in politics, campaigning for greater women's rights, until her death in 1910 at age 77.
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February 21, 1878 – Mirra Alfassa born in France, spiritual guru, occultist, and collaborator of the Indian yogi and nationalist Sri Aurobindo, who considered her to be of equal yogic stature to him. Alfassa, called “The Mother” by her followers, founded the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, and established Auroville as a ‘universal town.’
- February 21, 1888 – Clemence Dane born as Winifred Ashton, English novelist and playwright; her first novel, Regiment of Women, was a semi-veiled treatment of lesbian relationships; also noted for A Bill of Divorcement, Third Person Singular, and Enter Sir John, coauthored with Helen Simpson.
- February 21, 1903 – Anaïs Nin born in France of Cuban parents, diarist, essayist, novelist, and writer of short stories and erotica. She began 69 volumes of journals with a letter to her father; noted for the novels Delta of Venus and Little Birds.
- February 21, 1909 – Helen Octavia Dickens born, daughter of a former slave, and the first African-American woman to be admitted to the American College of Surgeons. She was a doctor, professor of obstetrics and gynecology, and an associate dean of medicine. At Crane Junior College, she sat at the front of her classes, to avoid the racist comments and gestures aimed at her by fellow students. She earned a B.S. from the University of Illinois College of Medicine in 1932, and her M.D. in 1934. She was one of two women in her class and was the only African-American woman in her class. After her residency at Chicago’s Provident Hospital, she worked at the Aspiranto Health Home in North Philadelphia for 7 years, then spent a year at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. She passed the board examinations and became the first female African American board-certified Ob/gyn in Philadelphia. In 1943, Dickens was accepted into a residency at Harlem Hospital in New York City. She finished her residency in 1946, and was certified by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in the same year. In 1948, she became director of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Philadelphia’s racially segregated Mercy Douglass hospital, where she remained until 1967. After leaving Mercy Douglass, she opened a clinic at the University of Pennsylvania for teen parents, offering group counseling, therapy, education, and prenatal care. Dickens also became dean of admissions (1967-1972), increasing the number of minority students at UPenn from three to 64.
- February 21, 1914 – Jean Frances Tatlock born, American physician and psychiatrist; a member of the Communist Party who wrote for their publication, Western Worker; when she began a relationship with physicist Robert Oppenheimer in 1936, her Communist associations brought her under surveillance by the FBI and her phone was tapped; stress and clinical depression led to her suicide in January, 1944.
- February 21, 1915 – Claudia Cumberbatch Jones born in Trinidad, came to the U.S. as a child, American author, Communist and black nationalist; wrote a column called “Half the World,” for the Daily Worker; when deported from the U.S. in 1955, she moved to the UK, and founded Britain’s first major black newspaper, The West Indian Gazette, in 1958; noted for “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!”
- February 21, 1924 – Thelma Estrin born, American computer scientist and engineer, pioneer in expert systems and biomedical engineering, applying computer technology to medical research and healthcare; IEEE Centennial Medal (1984).
- February 21, 1924 – Dorothy Blum born, American cryptanalyst and computer scientist who worked for the National Security Agency (NSA) and its predecessors from 1944 to 1980, becoming the first woman in the NSA’s management hierarchy in 1972, as chief of NSA Computer Operations.
- February 21, 1927 – Erma Bombeck, humorist and columnist, began writing obituaries and columns on gardening, eventually wrote books of humor, supported the Equal Rights Amendment. She appeared on “Good Morning America” television show for eleven years.
- February 21, 1933 – Nina Simone born, iconic singer, songwriter, arranger, and civil rights activist. Her song, "Mississippi Goddam," in response to Medgar Evers’ murder and the Birmingham Alabama church bombing that killed 4 pre-teen black girls and blinded a 5th, was boycotted in parts of the American South.
- February 21, 1936 – Barbara Jordan born, American lawyer, civil rights leader, and Democratic politician; because of segregation, she was not allowed to be a student at the University of Texas at Austin, so she attended Texas Southern University, an historically-black institution, majoring in political science and history. At Texas Southern, Jordan was a national champion debater, defeating opponents from Yale and Brown and tying Harvard University. She graduated magna cum laude in 1956. After unsuccessfully running for a seat in the Texas State House of Representatives, she was elected to the Texas State Senate in 1966, becoming the first African-American state senator since 1883 and the first black woman to serve in that body (1967-1973). She then was the first African-American woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives (1973-1978) from a Southern state. President Lyndon Johnson used a bit of his influence to see that she served on the House Judiciary Committee, where she memorably participated in the Nixon impeachment hearings over the Watergate scandal: “My faith in the Constitution is whole; it is complete; it is total. And I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction, of the Constitution.” By 1975, Speaker of the House Carl Albert had appointed her to the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee. In 1976, Jordan became the first woman to deliver a keynote address at a Democratic National Convention. In the U.S. House, she sponsored expanding coverage of the Voting Rights Act, and voted to impeach Richard Nixon. In all, she sponsored or co-sponsored over 300 bills, many of which became laws. Jordan retired from politics in 1979, and taught ethics for 17 years as an adjunct professor in the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, ironically at the University of Texas at Austin, where segregation had kept her from being a student. Jordan was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1990. She was again a keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention in 1992. In 1994, President Clinton awarded Jordan the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the NAACP presented her with the Spingarn Medal. She suffered from leukemia, but died from pneumonia complications in January, 1996, at the age of 59. President Bill Clinton revealed he had wanted to nominate her to the U.S. Supreme Court, but by the time the opportunity arose, her health was already in decline.
- February 21, 1942 – Margarethe von Trotta born, German film director, a notable member of the New German Cinema movement, considered Germany’s foremost postwar woman director; her Sister films, Sisters, or The Balance of Happiness (Schwestern oder die Balance des Glücks, Marianne and Juliane (Die Bleierne Zeit), and Three Sisters (Paura e amore) established her career.
- February 21, 1947 – Olympia Snowe (Republican-Maine), served in the U.S. House (1979-1995) and the Senate (1995-2013); centrist Republican, health care access, and abortion rights advocate; she cited extreme partisanship causing Congressional dysfunction when she retired; now co-chair of Bipartisan Policy Center Commission on Political Reform.
- February 21, 1950 – Sahle-Work Zewde born, Ethiopian career diplomat; President of Ethiopia since 2018; the first woman to hold the office, she was elected unanimously by the Federal Parliamentary Assembly. Previously, she was Under Secretary-General, Head of the United Nations Office to the African Union (1918), and Director-General of the United Nations Office at Nairobi (2011-2018). She was the second Ethiopian woman to serve as an ambassador, appointed to embassies in France, Tunisia and Morocco, Djibouti, and Senegal, as well as serving as her country’s Permanent Representative to the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) and as Permanent Representative to UNESCO.
- February 21, 1954 – Christina Rees born, British Labour Co-operative politician and barrister; Member of Parliament for Neath since 2015.
- February 21, 1967 – Sari Essayah born, Finnish Christian Democratic politician; member of the European Parliament (2009-2014); party secretary for the Christian Democrats (2007-2009); Member of the Finnish Parliament (2003-2007 and current member since 2015) Former race walker who won the 1993 World Championship, and the 1994 European Championship, as well as holding seven Finnish national records.
- February 21, 1983 – Mélanie Laurent born, French film and stage actress, filmmaker, screenwriter, singer, and pianist. Her first role was in the 1999 film, The Bridge, when she was 16. She made her Hollywood debut in 2009 in Inglourious Basterds. Laurent made her directorial and screenwriting debut with the short film De moins en moins (Less and Less). She then made her first appearance on the French stage in 2010. She directed the feature films The Adopted, which she co-wrote, and Respire, which was screened at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. Laurent co-directed the documentary, Tomorrow, with Cyril Dion, which won the 2015 César Award for Best Documentary Film from France’s Académie des Arts et Techniques du Cinéma. Tomorrow showcases initiatives in ten countries around the world which are concrete examples of solutions to 21st century environmental and social challenges.
- February 21, 2017 – A federal judge temporarily blocked Texas from cutting off Medicaid money to Planned Parenthood over secretly recorded videos released by anti-abortion activists in 2015. The activists claimed that the videos showed Planned Parenthood officials trying to illegally profit from the sale of fetal tissue, but U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks of Austin said that Texas health authorities had not presented “even a scintilla of evidence” to justify punishing Planned Parenthood and denying Medicaid patients the right to go to the group’s 34 health centers in Texas. At the time, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said the state would appeal the court’s temporary injunction.
- February 21, 2020 – A group photography exhibition at London’s Barbican Art Gallery aims, according to Barbican curator Alona Pardo, to explore how masculinity has been “experienced, performed, coded and socially constructed” in photography and film from the 1960s to the present. Several of the featured photographers are women, including American Catherine Opie, whose series shows high school football players in the U.S., already posing for future magazine spreads when they make the big leagues. Two other American women, Collier Schorr and Sam Contis, explore images of the All-American masculine archetype, the Cowboy. British documentary photographer Anna Fox put together My Mother’s Cupboards and My Father’s Words, combining “colour photographs of my mother’s tidy cupboards with excerpts of my father’s rantings.” Shelves filled with pink china crockery and rose-tinted glasses juxtaposed with an intricate inscription, “I’m going to tear your mother to shreds with an oyster knife” are unsettling, to say the least. Laurie Anderson’s ‘Fully Automated Nikon’ skews the casual sexism women encountered daily in 1970s New York, and while Marianne Wex’s ‘Let’s Take Back Our Space’ nailed “manspreading” long before the term was invented.
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- February 22, 705 – Empress Wu Zetian, who became the de facto ruler of China after her husband Emperor Gaizong’s debilitating stroke and his later death, from 690 to 705, is forced to abdicate after a successful coup. Wu Zeitan was the only woman in Chinese history to wear the yellow robes as monarch, which had been reserved for the sole use of emperors.
- February 22, 1805 – Sarah Fuller Flower Adams born, English poet and hymn lyricist, best known for writing the words for the hymn “Nearer, My God, To Thee.”
- February 22, 1822 – Isabella Beecher Hooker born, suffragist, lecturer, wrote and presented a bill that gave property rights to married women to Connecticut General Assembly, every year until it passed in 1877.
- February 22, 1860 – Mary Washington Bacheler born, the daughter of Baptist missionaries who served in India. In 1890, after completing her medical degree at the Women’s Medical College in New York, she became the first woman medical missionary of the Free Baptist Woman’s Missionary Society, and rejoined her parents in West Bengal. She spoke the Bengali and Odia languages fluently, taught school, and provided medical care for women who would not see a male doctor for religious reasons. Bacheler retired in 1933, and left India in 1936. She died in 1939 at age 79 in Newton, Massachusetts.
- February 22, 1876 – Zitkala-Sa (Red Bird) born, also known as Gertrude Bonnin, writer, editor, musician, teacher and Sioux Indian activist of the Yankton Dakota. In 1913, she wrote the libretto and lyrics for the first American Indian opera, The Sun Dance Opera. She was co-founder of the National Council of American Indians in 1926, a group which lobbied for U.S. citizenship and civil rights for Indians, and served as NCAM’s first President (1926-1938).
- February 22, 1889 – Olave Baden-Powell born, wife of Robert Baden-Powell, becomes English Chief Commissioner of the reorganized Girl Guides (1915-1918), then Chief Guide (1918).
- February 22, 1892 – Edna St. Vincent Millay born, American poet and playwright; in 1923, she was the third woman to win Pulitzer Poetry Prize for The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver and Other Poems. She also wrote prose pieces under the pen name Nancy Boyd to pay the bills. In 1943, she was the second woman to be awarded the Robert Frost Medal for “distinguished lifetime service to American poetry.”
- February 22, 1892 – Thillaiaadi Valliammai born, South African Tamil activist, worked with Gandhi during protests in South Africa; she fell ill soon after being sentenced to three months hard labor and refused early release, then died soon after serving her term.
- February 22, 1900 – Meridel LeSueur born, poet, short fiction writer, activist, and essayist on unfair labor conditions and land rights of Southwest and Minnesota Native American tribes. After studying dance and physical fitness, in the early 1920s she moved to New York City. She studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Acting, and lived in an anarchist commune. By 1925, she was a member of the Communist Party. She found work in Hollywood as an extra and a stunt woman in silent pictures, but also continued to write articles for newspapers and journals, and children’s books which became popular, including biographies like Nancy Hanks of Wilderness Road, and Sparrow Hawk. She was blacklisted in the 1950s as a communist, and taught writing classes in her mother’s home. In the 1960s, she travelled the U.S., attending and writing about the student protests, and in the 1970s, she lived among the Navajo people in Arizona. Her work was discovered by feminists in the 1970s, and enjoyed a revival. Le Sueur’s unpublished novel, The Girl, written in the 1930s, was finally published in 1978. Noted for her memorable 1932 portrait of women during the Great Depression, “Women on the Bread Lines.”
- February 22, 1906 – Willa Brown Chapell born, African American aviator, civil rights activist, and lobbyist; first black woman officer in the U.S Civil Air Patrol; co-founder with Cornelius Coffey of a school of aeronautics, the first private flight training academy owned and operated by African Americans.
- February 22, 1906 – Constance Stokes born, modernist Australian painter; one of only two women artists included in a major traveling exhibition of Australian artists in the 1950s, shown in Canada, the UK, and Italy.
- February 22, 1917 – Jane Bowles born, American playwright and novelist; noted for In the Summer House.
- February 22, 1926 – World Thinking Day is launched by the Girl Guides and Girl Scouts, as a day of international friendship, and speaking out on issues affecting girls and young women, and fundraising projects.
- February 22, 1933 – Sheila Hancock born, English theatre, television and radio actress; author of a memoir, The Two of Us, about her marriage to actor John Thaw, and Just Me, her account of coming to terms with widowhood after his death in 2002. In 2014, she published her debut novel, Miss Carter’s War. She read Maya Angelou’s poem “Touched by an Angel” at an ‘I Do to Equal Marriage’ event in 2014 celebrating the legalization of same-sex marriage in England and Wales. She is a Patron of the London HIV charity The Food Chain, and worked with the Kids Company, a charity for disadvantaged children, and youthful ex-offenders.
- February 22, 1937 – Joanna Russ born, American science fiction and fantasy author, feminist essayist and activist; known for her novels, Picnic on Paradise; The Female Man; and The Zanzibar Cat. Also known for her non-fiction books, How to Suppress Women’s Writing, describing the systematic social forces that stifle widespread recognition of the work of women authors, and To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction.
- February 22, 1959 – Bronwyn Oliver born, Australian sculptor, noted for her large metal sculptures commissioned as public art.
- February 22, 1966 – Rachel Dratch born, American comedian and writer; part of the improvisational theatre group The Second City in Chicago, and a cast member on the TV show Saturday Night Live (1999-2006); author of Girl Walks Into a Bar: Comedy Calamities, Dating Disasters and a Midlife Miracle.
- February 22, 1967 – Playwright Barbara Garson’s satire MacBird premieres in New York City.
- February 22, 1969 – Barbara Jo Rubin is the first woman jockey to win a U.S. thoroughbred horse race, riding Cohesian in the 9th race at the Charles Town Race Track in West Virginia.
- February 22, 2001 – A U.N. war crimes tribunal convicts three Bosnian Serbs charged with rape and torture, in the first wartime sexual enslavement case to go before an international court. Some of the evidence used in preparation of the indictments issued by the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague was gathered by Serbian human rights campaigner Natasa Kandic.
- February 22, 2017 – The Trump administration rescinded Obama-era anti-discrimination protections for transgender students. Donald Trump overruled Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ concerns about the move. The Obama administration had ordered schools to let transgender students use public school restrooms corresponding to their gender identity, and Democrats immediately criticized Trump for rolling back the policy. “No student should face discrimination at school because of who they are,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Democrat-California) said in a statement. “Transgender students have the same right to a safe environment at school and in their community as everyone else.”
- February 22, 2019 – The Trump administration issued a new rule that excluded abortion providers and abortion referrers from Title X funding, and which re-directed almost all of the family planning program’s $286 million budget to faith-based reproductive health groups. The rule took effect 60 days after it was published in its final form on the federal register. Under the rule, Planned Parenthood, which has served 40% of Title X patients, and all other similar providers, could no longer provide abortions or issue referrals at the same facilities it uses for other reproductive services, such as STD and breast cancer screenings. The final rule eliminated Title X’s long-standing requirement that all pregnant patients be offered nondirective pregnancy options counseling, including information about parenting, adoption, and abortion. Eliminating this requirement summarily dismisses the evidence-informed clinical recommendations for providing high-quality family planning care. Since its inception in 1970, Title X had been a bedrock, cost-effective health care program helping ensure that poor and low-income individuals had access to critical family planning care, including a full range of contraceptives, pelvic exams, sexually transmitted disease testing and treatment, and screening for breast and cervical cancer. The National Family Planning & Reproductive Health Association, and Cedar River Clinics, represented by the ACLU, filed a challenge to the changed rule. A separate lawsuit was filed by Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson, who was joined by attorneys general from 22 other states. The American Medical Association also filed a legal challenge. Because of the new rules, the number of clinics receiving Title X funding and the number of patients served by the program dropped precipitously – not only did Planned Parenthood formally withdraw as an organization, but about 25% of Title X sub-recipients and sites have left the Title X network, and six states – Hawaii, Maine, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, and Washington – entirely withdrew from the network. There were split decisions on the lawsuits: the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals held that the regulations are arbitrary and capricious and contrary to law, but the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals allowed the regulations to go into effect. Many provisions in the Trump Administration’s regulation mirror those issued in 1988 by the Reagan Administration. In 1991, the Supreme Court upheld the Reagan regulations in the case, Rust v Sullivan, but the Reagan provisions were rescinded by President Clinton when he came into office. The Biden administration is expected to reverse the Trump changes. What is needed is legislation reinforcing and clarifying the original Title X provisions passed by Congress, and signed into law to prevent these abrupt and radical changes back and forth as control of the Executive Branch passes from Republican presidents to Democratic presidents and back again – otherwise, women’s healthcare will remain a political football.
- February 22, 2020 – In the UK, 44 groups and organizations, and over 800 current and former students signed an open letter from the Cambridge University Students’ Union Women’s Campaign calling for colleges to be stripped of their powers to investigate sexual misconduct complaints against their own members, because of a case at Trinity Hall, Cambridge’s fifth oldest college. Dr. William O’Reilly, the don in charge of student welfare at Trinity, appointed a panel to investigate rape allegations against a male student, then gave evidence to the panel in support of the accused. Three female students told academic staff in February 2018 that they had been raped and sexually assaulted by the male student. He denied the allegations. Two of the women made formal complaints, which were tested at a disciplinary hearing by a panel of dons appointed by O’Reilly, who was Trinity Hall’s acting senior tutor. The panel cleared the student of wrongdoing but raised concerns that another academic, Dr Nicholas Guyatt, had acted inappropriately by helping the women to draft their complaints. Guyatt was placed under investigation, and ultimately cleared, but did not regain his pastoral role. He later chose to resign, and became a fellow at another Cambridge college. Trinity Hall has announced that both O’Reilly and the college’s master, the Reverend Canon Dr. Jeremy Morris, have “voluntarily stepped back from duties” until a separate panel of Cambridge fellows issues a report on what the college should do. The letter’s author, Kate Litman, women’s officer at the students’ union, said: “This case is about more than individual failings. It is about an institution-wide failure to protect survivors and tackle sexual violence. That’s why we believe it’s crucial for colleges to commit to a centralised, independent system for handling cases of sexual misconduct. The Women’s Campaign will continue to hold the University to account for its handling of sexual misconduct, and to call for further reform from the university disciplinary procedure.” By the end of March, 2020, barrister Gemma White QC had been appointed to lead the inquiry. White has extensive experience and expertise in cases of bullying, harassment, and sexual misconduct, and has led inquiries at other education establishments. To date, no report of the inquiry having been completed has appeared on the Internet.
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- February 23, 1539 – Salima Sultan Begum born, fourth wife of the Mughal Emperor Akbar; she was highly educated, and known for her love of reading and extensive library. She became a senior-ranking wife, wielding much influence with both her husband and his son Janhangir, as well as being a political power in the Mughal court. She was also a poet, who wrote under the pseudonym Makhfi (Hidden One), which was later also used as a pen name by her great-great-granddaughter, Princess Zeb-un-Nissa.
- February 23, 1787 – Emma Hart Willard, American educator and women’s right activist; founder of the first American school for secondary and higher education for women, the Troy Female Seminary, which taught girls mathematics, classical languages, history, geography and the sciences, as well offering training as teachers; now called Emma Willard School, a private college preparatory school for women.
- February 23, 1868 – Anna Hofman-Uddgren born, Swedish cabaret and music hall performer who later worked as a theatre director, and then became the first woman to direct a film in Sweden, the 1911 silent picture, Stockholmsfrestelser. She also made silent film versions of August Strinberg’s Fadren (The Father) and Fröken Julie (Miss Julie) in 1912.
- February 23, 1879 – Agnes Arber born, British botanist and author; noted for her studies of comparative anatomy of plants, especially monocotyledons (flowering plants with embryos bearing a single seed leaf, called a cotyledon); her first book, Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution, became a standard text. She was the first woman botanist to be made a member of the Royal Society. Included among her later works are Water Plants: A Study of Aquatic Angiosperms, Monocotyledons, and The Gramineae: A Study of Cereal, Bamboo and Grass.
- February 23, 1889 – Musidora born as Jeanne Roques; French actress, silent film director and screenwriter; she became a silent film star playing a vampire in the 10-part film serial, Les Vampires (1915-1916). She produced and directed ten films, but only Soleil et Ombre (Sun and Shadow – 1922) and La Terre des Taureaux (The Land of Bulls -1924) have survived. One of her lost films was La vagabonda (The Vagabond – 1924), which she co-wrote with Colette, based on the author’s novel of the same name.
- February 23, 1892 – Agnes Smedley born, American journalist and novelist; known for her semi-autobiographical novel Daughter of Earth, and her sympathetic reporting on the Chinese Communist forces during the Chinese Civil War (1927-1937, and resumed 1945-1949). She was also an advocate for women’s rights, birth control, and children’s welfare.
- February 23, 1900 – Elinor Warren born, composer, gifted pianist, wrote art songs, major orchestral works: “The Harp Weaver,” “The Legend of King Arthur” and “Crystal Lake.”
- February 23, 1901 – Ruth Rowland Nichols born, American aviation pioneer; the only woman pilot to simultaneously hold speed, altitude, and distance world records.
- February 23, 1904 – Helen Nearing born, determined to live a more simple life, she and husband Scott learned better techniques for surviving independently, lectured on ‘The Good Life’ practices, based on their Maine homestead and organic garden.
- February 23, 1915 – Nevada Bill AB-11, turning back the state’s residency requirements for divorce from one year to just six months, is signed into law by Governor Emmet Boyle, paving the way for Reno to become the “Divorce Capital of America,” a $5 million-a-year industry in the 1930s, after the residency requirement was lowered again in 1931, to a mere 6 weeks.
- February 23, 1923 – Mary Francis Shura born, American author of over 50 novels; wrote children’s books like her Kids of the Neighborhood series; and gothic, romance, historical fiction, and suspense novels, mainly for teen readers. She used several pen names, including M.F. Craig, Alexis Hill, and Mary S. Craig. Elected President of the Mystery Writers of America in 1990.
- February 23, 1936 – Sylvia Chaise born, American broadcast journalist; worked for CBS News as the writer and narrator for the radio show The American Woman, one of the earliest women reporters at CBS (1971-1977); moved to ABC in 1977, and was a correspondent for ABC’s 20/20 (1978-1985); after working as a news anchor at KRON in San Francisco (1985- 1990), she co-anchored Prime Time Live (1991-2001), then moved to PBS, working on Now with Bill Moyers (2002-2004) before she retired. Chase died at age 80 of cancer in 2019.
- February 23, 1947 – Pia Kjærsgaard born, Danish politician; leader of the right-centrist Danish People’s Party (1995-2012); Member of Parliament since 1984, and the first woman Speaker of the Danish Parliament, from 2015 to the present.
- February 23, 1950 – Rebecca Newberger Goldstein born, American philosopher and author; noted for the “mattering theory” introduced in her novel The Mind-Body Problem.
- February 23, 1954 – Rajani Thiranagama born, Tamil physician, human rights activist, and feminist; she and her sister Nirmala became involved as students with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam (LTTE). In 1982, while Rajani was in Britain at the Liverpool Medical School for postgraduate studies in anatomy, Nirmala was arrested under Sri Lanka’s Prevention of Terrorism Act during the civil war in which the Tamil insurgents were fighting for an independent Tamil state. Rajani launched an international campaign for her sister’s release. She joined human rights groups that were exposing the atrocities in Sri Lanka, and grassroots organizations campaigning for women’s rights and ending discrimination against Black people in Britain. Returning to Sri Lanka, she began to feel that all the violence was wrong, and began criticizing the narrow nationalism of the LTTE, and started collecting evidence of human rights violation and atrocities committed by the LTTE, the Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front, the Indian Peace Keeping Force, and the Sri Lankan government forces. She co-authored a book, The Broken Palmyra, documenting the violence in 1989. A few weeks after its publication, she was shot to death by a gunman while cycling home from work. The LTTE and the EPRLF have each been suspected of the killing.
- February 23, 1956 – Sandra Osborne born, Scottish Labour politician; Member of Parliament for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (1997-2015); served on the Foreign Affairs Select Committee (2005–2010 + 2013-2015); was a member of the Defence Select Committee (2010-2013); and also a member of the Council of Europe.
- February 23, 1965 – Constance Baker Motley is elected as Manhattan Borough president, the highest elective office held by a black woman in a major American city up to that time. She later became the first African-American woman appointed to the federal judiciary.
- February 23, 1969 – Martine Croxall born, British media journalist; she began her career at BBC radio in 1991, then became one of BBC television’s news presenters. She was the main BBC World News presenter on-camera continuously for two and half hours during the Paris attacks in November 2015 in which 130 people were killed, and 413 people were injured. Croxall was highly praised for her professionalism, and her skillful coordination of reports coming in live from correspondents at the scenes of the attacks, sorting through conflicting reports, and clarifying what was unsubstantiated, and what was confirmed.
- February 23, 2003 – Norah Jones wins 5 Grammy Awards for her album Come Away With Me, which tied Lauryn Hill and Alicia Keys for most Grammy Awards received by a female artist in one night.
- February 23, 2011 – The Obama administration said it will no longer defend the constitutionality of DOMA, the so-called Defense of Marriage Act, the federal law banning recognition of same-sex marriage.
- February 23, 2020 – In Queensland, Australia, a woman only identified as Dani was told in 2017 that there was a prima facie case against her former partner for threatening violence, but because there was “a low level of public interest” they would not bring a charge. What her former partner had done was splash petrol on her and then threaten to burn their house down, while she was in it. She took the rare step of hiring a barrister and prosecuting the criminal case herself. Her barrister, Clem van der Weegen, said the private prosecution and guilty plea should “deeply embarrass” the Queensland police. At a hearing last year, a Queensland magistrate’s court was told that officers had refused to cooperate with the case and had declined to make written witness statements. They eventually supplied statements after Dani’s legal team complained directly to the police commissioner, Katarina Carroll. Dani said she was warned the process would be costly and time-consuming but that she “could not allow [his] actions to define the rest of my life . . . It has been over four years since I believed I was going to die at the hands of my partner. Every day I am faced with the challenge of living with post-traumatic stress disorder, the loss of who I was, how I was able to function in life and what I was able to achieve. [His] threat to set me alight has had a profound and irreversible effect on my life and the lives of my children. No woman, no victim should ever have to go to these lengths to seek justice. But I had heard so many harrowing accounts from DV survivors and so many instances of the Queensland police failing to take DV victims seriously, failing to bring criminal charges to make perpetrators accountable, and failing to keep women and children safe that I felt I really had no choice but to carry on.” In January, the accused pleaded guilty to threatening violence. In doing so, the man admitted to details including that he splashed petrol on Dani and threatened to burn down the house. She was inside the house at the time. The man was sentenced to 130 hours community service and had no conviction recorded. Dani says her story highlights how women can be failed in domestic violence cases where the victim and offender give radically different versions of events. The man had previously pleaded guilty to a property offence – willful damage – that occurred on the same night, but was not charged in relation to his domestic violence.
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- February 24, 1604 – Arcangela Tarabotti born as Elena Cassandra, Italian nun and writer; her health problems as a child caused her father to send her at the age of 11 to the Benedictine Convent of Sant’Anna. Monachization, placing a child in a monastery or convent, especially by force, was a common practice, often used to solve the problem of daughters deemed “unmarriageable.” It was a major theme in Tarabotti’s writings. She became Archangela, taking her first vows at 16, and her final vows in 1623, when she was 19, making her monastic status permanent. During her early years in the cloister, Tarabotti was rebellious and outspoken, refusing to wear the religious habits or cut her hair until directly ordered to do so by Catholic Cardinal and Patriarch of Venice Federico Baldissera Cornaro. She wrote of Cardinal Cornaro, “He made me amend my vanities. I cut off my hair, but I did not uproot my emotions. I reformed my life, but my thoughts flourish rampantly, and just like my shorn hair, grow all the more." She wrote that living like a nun, she was “living a lie.” Most enclosed women lived isolated from the rest of society, prohibited by Canonical law from interacting with people outside the cloister. Tarabotti educated herself, reading and writing a great deal during her years in the convent. She also managed to circulate her works among an impressive network of correspondents who were writers, scientists, and political figures, in direct disobedience of Church officials. Tarabotti wrote at least seven works, and five were published during her lifetime. She frequently compared the number of women followers of Jesus in the New Testament with the increasing limitation of women’s roles within the Catholic Church, and argued that women should have more educational opportunities and larger roles in the church and in society. She is the only woman writer in Venice documented to have the patronage of Giovanni Francisco Loredan, founder of the Accademia degli Incogniti. Her Letters Familiar and Formal, when she had them published, show the extent of her network of powerful allies in Northern Italy and France, which probably helped protect her from retaliation for her outspoken criticisms of the church and society. Her text, Paternal Tyranny, scathing and deeply subversive for the day, was not published until two years after her death, and was added to the Index librorum prohibitorum, the banned books list of the church, in 1661.
- February 24, 1827 – Lydia E. Becker born, pioneer in the British women’s suffrage movement; amateur in astronomy and botany who devised a method to dry plants so they retain their original colour, and advocate for including girls in scientific education, arguing for a national non-gendered education system. Becker founded the Manchester Women’s Suffrage Committee in 1867, the first group of its kind in England; in 1869, she was a leader in a successful campaign to secure the vote for women in municipal elections, and granting them inclusion on school boards; in 1870, she was one of four women elected to the Manchester School Board. She and Jessie Boucherett co-founded the Women’s Suffrage Journal (1870-1890), and Becker served as publisher. It became the most widely read British publication on women’s suffrage, carrying news of events affecting women’s lives, publishing speeches, the editors’ correspondence with supporters and opponents, and practical advice for activists, such as how to prepare a petition for presentation to the House of Commons. She differed from many other feminists, arguing more strenuously for the voting rights of unmarried women. Women connected to husbands and stable sources of income, Becker believed, were less desperately in need of the vote than widows and single women. This attitude made her a target of frequent ridicule in newspaper commentary and editorial cartoons.
- February 24, 1837 – Rosalia de Castro born, major Galician Romantic poet and author (Galicia is a region of Spain), who wrote mostly in her native language, Galego. May 17, 1863, the publication date of her first poetry collection, is now celebrated as Día das Letras Galegas (Galician Literature Day), an official holiday in the Autonomous Community of Galicia.
- February 24, 1864 – Rebecca Lee Crumpler becomes the first black American woman to earn a medical degree, from New England Female Medical College; her Book of Medical Discourses may be the first medical publication by an African American.
- February 24, 1869 – Zara DuPont born, American suffragist and member of the wealthy DuPont family. In 1910, she worked unsuccessfully to include women's suffrage in the reformed state constitution of Ohio. In 1911, she joined the Cuyahoga Woman's Suffrage Association, going on the serve as the first Vice President of the Ohio Woman Suffrage Association. Du Pont worked with Florence Ellinwood Allen (the first U.S. woman to serve on a state supreme court) on the Ohio portion of Maud Wood Park’s national tour of U.S. colleges, which she began in 1900 to stir up support for suffrage among a new generation of women, resulting in the founding of the National College Equal Suffrage Association. DuPont was also a civil rights and trade union activist, specifically as a pro-labor shareholder activist at Bethlehem Steel and Montgomery Ward.
- February 24, 1877 – Ettie A. Rout born in Tasmania, but raised in New Zealand from the age of seven. She was a social reformer who founded the WWI New Zealand Volunteer Sisterhood, women volunteers who went to Egypt, and later to France, to aid the ANZACs (Australian and New Zealand troops). When Rout discovered how wide-spread venereal disease was among the soldiers, and how ineffectual the military’s torturous after-sex treatment was, she launched a campaign in France to prevent sexually transmitted diseases, including inspecting French brothels and rating them for newly-arriving soldiers. She also put together a safe sex kit, which was distributed by the British and Australian Armies. By 1917, even the New Zealand Army, which had initially resisted her idea, made free distribution of her preventative kits compulsory. Ironically, this made Rout persona non grata in New Zealand, where she was made into such a scandalous figure that she was vilified in the press by the New Zealand Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and publishing her name became subject to a ₤100 fine. Even after the war was over, her 1922 book, Safe Marriage: A Return to Sanity, a manual of contraception and prophylactics for women, was banned in New Zealand. It was published in Australia, and in Britain, where it became a best-seller. The British Medical Journal tepidly recommended the book for medical men and women, warning that "many readers will disagree with the author's point of view, and some will feel grave misgivings about the effect of her teaching; but none can doubt the sincerity of her purpose." Ettie Rout was aware that she was ahead of her time. She knew author H.G. Wells, and they exchanged letters. She wrote to him in 1922 that "It's a mixed blessing to be born too soon." Following her only postwar return to New Zealand in 1936, Ettie Rout, suffering from malaria, died at age 59 from a self-administered overdose of quinine at Rarotonga in the Cook Islands.
- February 24, 1883 – Rosalie Gardiner Jones born in New York state, American suffragist who organized marches, including a march by over 200 women from Manhattan to Albany, over 160 miles in 13 days in December and January. She was dubbed “General” Jones, and also led 225 women on a march to Washington DC in February 1913.
- February 24, 1887 – Mary Ellen Chase born, American educator, scholar, and author; noted for Windswept and Edge of Darkness.
- February 24, 1900 – Irmgard Bartenieff born, German-American dancer and physical therapist, leading pioneer of dance therapy.
- February 24, 1907 – Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer born, a South African museum official who discovers a modern-day coelacanth in 1938, a fish found in fossils from 200 million years ago, but long considered extinct.
- February 24, 1912 – Henrietta Szold founds Hadassah, the largest Jewish organization in American history, focus on healthcare and education in Israel and U.S.
- February 24, 192o – Nancy Astor becomes the first woman to speak in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom following her election as a Member of Parliament (MP) three months earlier. Her topic was drastic drink reforms. “. . . you must remember that women have got a vote now and we mean to use it, and use it wisely, not for the benefit of any section of society, but for the benefit of the whole .”
- February 24, 1932 – Brazilian women win the right to vote. Although the right to vote was extended to all women in 1932, there were still barriers managed to their participation. The main obstacle was that the vote became compulsory only for men, which meant that married women would only be able to vote if their husbands gave them permission, since the civil code at that time stated that women should be authorized by their husbands or fathers to act outside of their imposed duties. So married women’s right to vote only became equal to men’s in 1945, when the vote became compulsory for both sexes.
- February 24, 1934 – Renata Scotto born, Italian bel canto soprano and opera director. Since her 2002 retirement from the stage, she has also taken academic posts at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome and the Juilliard School in New York.
- February 24, 1942 – Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak born, Indian literary scholar and feminist; founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society; noted for her essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak was awarded the 2012 Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy for “speaking for the humanities against intellectual colonialism.”
- February 24, 1948 – Jayaram Jayalalithaa born, Indian AIADMK politician and film actress; served as the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu (1991-2016); general secretary (1989-2016) of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam(AIADMK) party, a Dravidian people’s party based on the ideology of Periyar E.V. Ramasamy, whose goal was to eradicate the caste system; during the 1960s, she was dubbed “Queen of the Tamil Cinema” and appeared in 140 films.
- February 24, 1951 – Laimdota Straujuma born, Latvian politician and economist; the first woman Prime Minister of Latvia (2014-2016); Minister of Agriculture (2011-2014); Secretary of State of the Ministry for Regional Development and Local Government (2007-2010).
- February 24, 1951 – Helen Shaver born, Canadian actress, film and television director. Summer’s End was her TV movie directorial debut in 1999, which was nominated for Daytime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Writing in a Children’s Special, and for Outstanding Directing for a Children’s Special. Shaver has also directed a number of television shows and made-for-cable movies. She won a Gemini award in 2003 for Best Direction in a Dramatic Series for the Just Cause series episode "Death's Details."
- February 24, 1952 – Judith Ortiz Cofer born, Puerto Rican American author; 1990 Pushcart Prize for “More Room”; she was the first Hispanic to win the O Henry Prize, for her story, “The Latin Deli.”
- February 24, 1954 – Aurora Levins Morales born, Puerto Rican Jewish American writer and poet; significant in Latina and Third World feminism, and other social justice movements, including advocating for people with disabilities. She lives with multiple disabilities and chronic illnesses, including epilepsy, several brain injuries, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, and multiple chemical sensitivities. After a stroke, she was wheelchair bound from 2007 to 2009, when she traveled to Cuba and underwent extensive treatment. Known for Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals and Remedios: Stories of Earth and Iron from the History of Puertorriqueñas.
- February 24, 1956 – Judith Butler born, American philosopher, gender theorist and LGBT rights activist; her book, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, has had an impact on feminist and LGBT scholarship.
- February 24, 1956 – Paula Zahn born, American journalist and newscaster; Zahn is the current host of the true crime documentary series, On the Case with Paula Zahn.
- February 24, 1959 – Beth Broderick born, American television, film and stage actress; noted for the one-woman show Bad Dates at the Chicago Northlight Theatre; as co-author with Dennis Bailey of A Cup of Joe, Wonderland, and Literatti; and for playing Zelda Spellman on Sabrina, the Teenage Witch; she also directed several episodes of the series.
- February 24, 1967 – Jocelyn Bell Burnell makes the first discovery of a pulsar, a rapidly rotating neutron star.
- February 24, 1976 – Crista Flanagan born, American comedian and actress; member of the casts of MADtv and Mad Men; known for her impressions, and her one-woman show, But wait . . . I have Impressions! Flanagan plays the title character in the internet podcast Hope is Emo, and is one of the show’s creators.
- February 24, 1982 – Stella Young born, Australian comedian, journalist, and disability rights activist. She was born with osteogenesis imperfecta, and used a wheelchair for most of her life. Young became an activist at the age of 14 when she audited the accessibility of the main street businesses of her hometown. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism and Public Relations and a diploma in Education in 2004, and worked as a secondary school teacher, then on public programs at the Melbourne Museum, before becoming the editor of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s online magazine Ramp Up. In a Ramp Up editorial in July 2012 she deconstructed society's habit of turning disabled people into what she called "inspiration porn." After she began appearing in comedy showcases, she made her festival debut at the 2014 Melbourne International Comedy Festival, and won Best Newcomer for her show Tales from the Crip. She was a member of the boards of the Ministerial Advisory Council for the Department of Victorian Communities, Victorian Disability Advisory Council, the Youth Disability Advocacy Service and Women with Disabilities Victoria. She died at age 32 in 2014, and was posthumously inducted into the Victorian Honour Roll of Women for her work as a “journalist, comedian and fierce disability activist.”
- February 24, 2015 – Hot-Yoga empire founder Bikram Choudhury, 69, is facing six civil lawsuits filed by women accusing him of rape or assault, The New York Times reported. The most recent accusation was filed by Canadian Jill Lawler, who accused Choudhury of raping her during a teacher-training session in 2010. The first of the complaints surfaced in 2013. It triggered a series of other accusations ranging from assault to harassment. Choudhury denied doing anything wrong. In 2016, Choudhury was ordered to pay a 6.5 million dollar judgment. In 2017, a Los Angeles judge issued a warrant for Choudhury’s arrest on the grounds that he had fled the country without paying his former lawyer, Minakshi Jafa-Boden, the $7 million USD he owed her in compensation and punitive damages after he fired her. She gained control of his U.S. yoga business, but Choudhury was still training teachers in Spain and Mexico as of 2019.
- February 24, 2020 – Harvey Weinstein was found guilty of a criminal sex act in the first degree for forcing oral sex on the former Project Runway production assistant Miriam Haley in 2006, and of rape in the third degree of an unnamed woman in a New York hotel in 2013. The first count carries a minimum prison sentence of 5 years, and a maximum of up to 25 years, the second count carries a maximum sentence of 4 years in prison, and requires Weinstein to register as a sex offender. He was acquitted on the charge of predatory sexual assault, which carried a possible life sentence, and an alternative count of rape in the first degree. New York district attorney, Cyrus Vance, hailed the courage of the victims who had spoken out: “Weinstein with his manipulation, his resources, his attorneys, his publicists and his spies did everything he could to silence the survivors. But they wouldn’t be silenced, spoke from their hearts, and were heard.” Michelle Simpson Tuegel, an attorney representing victims of sexual assault, said she expected to see a wave of women coming forward with complaints against other sexual abusers.
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- February 25, 1570 – Pope Pius V issued papal bull Regnans in Excelsis (reigning on high) declaring "Elizabeth, the pretended Queen of England and the servant of crime", to be a heretic and releasing all her subjects from any allegiance to her: "We charge and command all and singular the nobles, subjects, peoples, and others afore said that they do not dare obey her orders, mandates and laws. Those who shall act to the contrary we include in the like sentence of excommunication." It sanctioned the right of Catholics to “deprive her of her throne.” Elizabeth’s limited tolerance of Catholic worship (in private) was ended after two rebellions in 1569: the “First Desmond Rebellion” in Ireland, and the “Northern Rebellion” by Catholic nobles trying to depose her and put Mary, Queen of Scots, on her throne. This Papal Bull led Elizabeth to execute any Catholic nobles who refused to vow allegiance to her.
- February 25, 1670 – Maria Winkelmann Kirch born, German astronomer, one of the first astronomers of her time to become famous, for her writings on the conjunction of the Sun with Saturn, Venus and Jupiter in 1709 and 1712. She was educated by her uncle, astronomer Christoph Arnold, as his unofficial apprentice and later assistant. She married astronomer and mathematician Gottfried Kirch, who was appointed as Astronomer Royal to Frederick III of Prussia. He continued her education, along with his sister; as a team, they made observations and calculations to produce calendars, and recorded weather information, both valuable to navigation. When she discovered the “Comet of 1702” during her nightly observations, her husband initially took credit for it, but eventually admitted that the discovery was hers. She was the first woman to discover a comet. After her husband’s death, she applied to the Royal Berlin Academy of Sciences, asking that she and her son Christfried be allowed to continue producing calendars. Kirch noted that during her husband’s illness, she had already been being doing the work required on her own. Gottfried Leibniz, mathematician and president of the academy, was the only supporter of Kirch’s petition, which was rejected because other academy members felt that having a woman produce its calendar would be an embarrassment. Instead, an inexperienced astronomer, Johann Heinrich Hoffmann, was appointed as the Astronomer Royal with the responsibility of producing the calendars.
- February 25, 1806 – Emma Manley Embury born, American author, poet and editor, who used the pen name ‘Ianthe’ to contribute stories and poems to periodicals and newspapers like the New York Mirror, which were later collected and published as books, including The Blind Girl and Other Tales; Glimpses of Home Life; Pictures of Early Life; and Nature’s Gems, or American Wild Flowers. She had a wide circle of literary friends and acquaintances, and was described as a sparkling conversationalist. But in the late 1840s, she suffered an illness from which she never recovered, becoming bed-ridden, and withdrawn from the world in her last years. She died in Brooklyn at age 56, in 1863.
- February 25, 1842 – Idawalley Zorada Lewis born, American lighthouse keeper, who takes over the Lime Rock Light after her parents die; she becomes the highest-paid lighthouse keeper in the U.S. – $750 a year – "in consideration of the remarkable services of Mrs. Wilson in the saving of lives." She makes her first rescue at the age of 12, and receives the Gold Lifesaving Medal from the U.S. Government in 1881 for rescuing two soldiers who fell through ice; makes her last rescue at age 63; called “the Bravest Woman in America,” Lime Rock and the Lime Rock Lighthouse are renamed Ida Lewis Rock and Lighthouse, the only time a Light has been renamed for its keeper.
- February 25, 1871 – Lesya Ukrainka born as Larysa Kosach-Kvitka, Ukrainian author of poetry, plays, and essays; she is considered the foremost woman of Ukrainian literature.
- February 25, 1890 – Myra Hess born, notable British pianist, who organized Monday through Friday lunchtime concerts, and performed in 150 of them, at the National Gallery during the WWII London Blitz, when all the concert halls were blacked out at night to avoid becoming German bombing targets. In all, 824,152 people attended 1,968 concerts, held without fail for 6 ½ years, even if London was being bombed (the concert was simply moved to a safer room). Every artist was paid five guineas for their participation, no matter who they were. Since 2005, the National Gallery has hosted concerts for Dame Myra Hess Day on October 6, in commemoration of the original Myra Hess concerts.
- February 25, 1896 – Ida Noddack born, German chemist; co-discoverer with Walter Noddack of the element rhenium; they also worked together in photochemistry, on sensitizing coloring substances and the photochemistry of the human eye. She postulated the possibility of fission based on reports of Fermi’s 1934 observations of the neutron bombardment of uranium, five years before Otto Frisch first advanced his theoretical explanation of nuclear fission, which was accepted, but her earlier idea aroused no interest, and remained dormant.
- February 25, 1900 – Illa Kesselburg Martin born, German dendrologist (wooded plants study) botanist, conservationist, and dentist. In 1951, she and her husband Ernst Martin founded the sequoia farm Sequoiafarm Kaldenkirchen using Sequoiadendron giganteum seeds sent from the U.S. It is now a famous arboretum with over 600 tree species.
- February 25, 1900 – Marina Yurlova born, Russian child soldier and author; at age 14, she became a soldier in the Russian army, joining the Reconnaissance Sotnia (100 horse squadron) of the 3rd Ekaterinodar Regiment. She started as a groom in Armenia, and then in 1915 began going on missions. She was shot in the leg while blasting bridges across the Araxes River near Yeredan, and after her recovery, trained as an auto mechanic to qualify as a military driver on the Eastern Front. She was wounded several more times, and was awarded the Russian Cross of Saint George for bravery three times. In 1922, she emigrated to the U.S., and became an American citizen in 1926. She published her autobiography as a trilogy: Cossack Girl; Russia, Farewell; and The Only Woman.
- February 25, 1906 – Mary Chase born, American playwright, best known for Harvey; Chase also worked as a feature writer for the Denver Times and Rocky Mountain News.
- February 25, 1908 – Mary Locke Petermann born, American cellular biochemist, she was the first person to isolate animal ribosomes, the molecular complexes which carry out protein synthesis. She was the first woman chemist on the staff of the physical chemistry department (1939-1945) at the University of Wisconsin, where she worked on analysis of antibody-antigen interactions, especially between diphtheria toxin and antitoxin. Her research on antibodies contributed to Rodney Porter’s determination of immunoglobulin structure, for which he received the 1972 Nobel Prize. In 1945, she took a position as a chemist at Memorial Hospital in New York City, studying the role of plasma proteins in metastasis, then in 1946 researched the role of nucleoproteins in cancer at the newly-formed Sloan-Kettering Institute for cancer research. Initially a Finney-Howell Foundation fellow, she was promoted to an associate member in 1960 and full member in 1963, Sloan-Kettering Institute's first female full member. She taught biochemistry at Cornell University and became the first woman full professor at Cornell University’s medical school. She was awarded the Sloan Award for cancer research in 1963, and the American Chemical Society’s Garvan Medal in 1966. Author of The Physical and Chemical Properties of Ribosomes, and about 100 papers.
- February 25, 1910 – Millicent Fenwick born, fashion editor, journalist, and Republican politician; served on New Jersey Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (1958-1974); Congresswoman (Republican-New Jersey, 1975-1983); served as U.S. Ambassador to the UN (1983-1987). She was a moderate Republican, and an outspoken supporter of civil and women’s rights; considered the inspiration for Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury character Lacey Davenport.
- February 25, 1922 – Molly Reilly born, the first Canadian woman pilot to reach the rank of captain, the first woman to become a Canadian corporate pilot, and the first woman to fly to the Arctic professionally. Her modifications to the Beechcraft Duke, a twin-engine fixed-wing plane with room for 5 passengers, were used to improve the aircraft. Over the course of her career, Reilly logged over 10,000 flight hours as a pilot-in-command — without a single accident. She was inducted into the Canadian Aviation Hall of Fame in 1974.
- February 25, 1966 – Téa Leoni born as Elizabeth Téa Pantaleoni, American television and film actress and producer; she most recently played the title role in the CBS political drama Madam Secretary (2014-2019); Leoni was named as a UNICEF goodwill ambassador in 2001, following in the footsteps of Helenka Pantaleoni, her grandmother, who was president of the U.S. Fund for UNICEF for more than 25 years.
- February 25, 1968 – Oumou Sangaré born, Malian musician, singer-songwriter in the Wassoulou tradition, an ancient regional music of Mali, and women’s rights advocate. When her father took a second wife and abandoned her mother and his first family, she began singing on the streets of Bamako. At age five, in 1973, she won a singing competition, which led to her performing before an audience of thousands at Bamako’s Omnisport stadium. At 16, she went on tour with the percussion group Djoliba, touring in Europe and the Caribbean. When she returned home, she formed her own group, and recorded her first album, Moussoulou (Women), with Amadou Ba Guindo, a renowned maestro of Malian music. The album sold over 200,000 copies in Africa. Her songs often include social criticism, especially women’s low status in Malian society. She has performed at the Melbourne Opera, Roskilde Festival, Gnaoua World Music Festival, WOMAD, Oslo World Music Festival, and the Opéra de la Monnaie. Sangaré was a goodwill ambassador for the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, and won a 2001 IMC-UNESCO International Music Prize. In 2017, she was honored with the Artist Award at WOMEX for her music and her advocacy for women’s rights.
- February 25, 1971 – Nova Peris born, Australian athlete and politician; Senator for the Northern Territory (2013-2016); she was the first Aboriginal Australian to win an Olympic gold medal, as a member of the Australian women’s hockey team at the 1996 Olympic Games. As a politician, she campaigned for Aboriginal civil rights.
- February 25, 1975 – Chelsea Handler born, American comedian, writer television host, producer, and activist; noted for her observational and sketch comedy, her late-night talk show Chelsea Lately (2007-2014) on the E! network, and five NY Times best-selling books, including My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands and Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea. She is an outspoken advocate for LGBT and human rights.
- February 25, 1976 – Rashida Jones born, American actress, writer, and producer; member of the cast of the comedy series Parks and Recreation (2009-2015); Jones was the creator of Frenemy of the State, a comic book series, and co-wrote the screenplay based on the comic series. Since 2004, she has been on the board of Peace First, a nonprofit which teachs children to resolve conflict without violence, and has also given time to events for Stand Up to Cancer, and ONE: The Campaign to Make Poverty History. In 2007, she was the honorary chair of the annual Housing Works benefit, which fights homelessness in New York City. She campaigned in 2008 and 2012 for Barack Obama. She is the daughter of Quincy Jones and actress Peggy Lipton.
- February 25, 1986 – Corazon Aquino is sworn in as the first woman President of the Philippines, after Ferdinand Marcos flees the country.
- February 25, 1986 – Jameela Jamil born in London to an Indian father and Pakistani mother; English actress, radio presenter, writer, and activist for people with disabilities, and against fat shaming and fad diets. In 2015, she launched Why Not People? which hosts entertainment events accessible to people with disabilities, aiming to increase awareness of accessibility issues. She was a presenter on the long-running BBC Radio 1 show, The Official Chart (2013-2015), and was a member of the cast of the American TV series, The Good Place (2016-2020).
- February 25, 2013 – British Liberal Democratic women activists are furious as at least ten women who allege they were molested by Lib Dem chief executive Lord Rennard are shrugged off by Liberal Democratic peer Tony Greaves, "We don’t know the details of anything that may have happened. But it is hardly an offence for one adult person to make fairly mild sexual advances to another. What matters is whether they are . . . rebuffed. In passing, I would note and guess that if the allegations as made are a matter for resignation, perhaps around a half of the male members of the Lords over the age of 50 would probably not be seen again." The Liberal Democratic party had belatedly suspended Lord Rennard for “bringing the party into disrepute,” after ignoring several complaints, but apparently overlooked the comment made by Lord Greaves until 2015, when he made even more vitriolic comments, accusing the women who said they were molested by Rennard of “not telling the truth” and a “deliberate vendetta,” so the party temporarily banned him from the Liberal Democrat Voice website.
- February 25, 2016 – A three-year independent investigation led by Dame Janet Smith, former High Court Judge, concluded that an "atmosphere of fear" at the BBC prevented the British network from stopping one of its stars, the late Jimmy Savile, from sexually abusing 72 victims, including children. Many of the BBC staff members interviewed for the inquiry did so only after being assured their names would not be published, as they still feared reprisals. "Celebrities were treated with kid gloves and were virtually untouchable," said Janet Smith. In October 2012, almost a year after Savile’s death, an ITV documentary examined claims of sexual abuse by Savile, which led to extensive media coverage, a substantial and rapidly growing body of witness statements and sexual abuse claims, and accusations against public bodies for covering up or failure of duty. Dame Janet Smith’s report did not recommend holding the BBC responsible, but did find that dozens of BBC employees had heard rumors about Savile, but did nothing.
- February 25, 2018 – The Weinstein Company announced it was filing for bankruptcy protection after a $500 million deal to sell the company to an investment group fell through. The board of the once-powerful film studio allegedly cut off negotiations when the investor group declined to offer to put up enough interim financing to keep the struggling company afloat. The Weinstein Company was already in financial trouble, due to mismanagement and a lack of entertainment hits, when the sexual assault and harassment allegations against co-founder Harvey Weinstein thrust it into turmoil. The board said bankruptcy was "an extremely unfortunate outcome for our employees, our creditors, and any victims," but claimed it was the "only viable option to maximize the company's remaining value." In January 2021, a bankruptcy court judge finally approved a liquidation plan for the former Weinstein Co., which had filed for Chapter 11 in 2019. The assets of the company were sold to a private-equity firm, with proceeds going to secured creditors. A group of unsecured trade creditors and victims of Harvey Weinstein have been arguing over how divide what’s left, basically settlement money offered by insurance companies. $17 million was allocated for a sexual misconduct claims fund that will be divided among the women.
- February 25, 2020 – Welsh pop singer Duffy, whose 2008 debut album Rockferry was hugely successful, made a statement revealing why she had retreated from the public eye after the release of her follow-up album Endlessly in 2010: “The truth is, and please trust me I am OK and safe now, I was raped and drugged and held captive over some days. Of course I survived. The recovery took time. There’s no light way to say it. But I can tell you in the last decade, the thousands and thousands of days I committed to wanting to feel the sunshine in my heart again, the sun does now shine.” Duffy, whose full name is Aimee Duffy, did not tell exactly when the attack happened, but added, “You wonder why I did not choose to use my voice to express my pain? I did not want to show the world the sadness in my eyes. I asked myself, how can I sing from the heart if it is broken? And slowly it unbroke.” She asked for privacy for her family.
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- February 26, 1746 – Maria Amalia born, Archduchess of Austria; one of sixteen children of Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa. She and her mother didn’t get along, and the Empress forced her into marriage with Ferdinand of Parma in 1769, even though Maria Amalia was in love with Prince Charles of Zweibrücken. She never forgave her mother. As Duchess of Parma, she had to contend with first minister Guillaume du Tillot, a Frenchman who was the de facto ruler of Parma, who kept the compliant Ferdinand out of politics. By 1771, she had acquired enough support to secure du Tillot’s dismissal, replacing him with a Spanish appointee, Jose del Llano. In 1772, she fired del Llano, insuring that Parma would not become a Spanish puppet state, and replaced him with an Italian prime minister and a cabinet of native Parmesans who were loyal to her. Ferdinand was not interested in ruling, happier occupying himself with his religious duties and raising their five children who survived infancy, so Maria Amalia became the real ruler of Parma. Because she and Ferdinand were so ill-suited, she caused a scandal because she replaced most of her ladies-in-waiting with an entourage of Royal Guards who were handsome young men. She also stole out at night into the streets, incognito in men’s clothing, and had affairs with members of her guards, while Ferdinand had affairs with a series of peasant women. The Parmesan nobility greatly disliked her, but she was very popular among the people, and known for her great and genuine generosity toward the poor. Among her more famous public gestures were the tables she had set up for poor guests, who enjoyed the same meals as the nobles, at her gala parties. She resisted her imperious mother's efforts to control her from afar, and was ostracized by most of her siblings. In May 1796, the French invaded Italy under Napoleon Bonaparte. Against the opposition of Maria Amalia, who detested the French after the execution of her sister Marie Antoinette, Ferdinand (who was half French himself), declared the Duchy neutral, but Napoleon’s troops occupied Parma anyway. Ferdinand was forced to agree to terms dictated by the French. Though Ferdinand and Amalia were formally allowed to keep their titles, they were under French guard, and French representatives ruled the Duchy, levying taxes to finance the French army. In the Treaty of Luneville in 1801, the Duchy of Parma was declared to be annexed to a newly founded French puppet state, the Kingdom of Etruria, effective upon Ferdinand’s death. Ferdinand and Maria Amalia were placed under house arrest. On October 9, 1802, Maria Amalia was appointed head of the Regency Council in Parma by Ferdinand on his death bed. Her official reign lasted only 13 days before the French under Napoleon I annexed the Duchy and expelled her from Parma. Maria Amalia died in Prague in 1804, at age 58.
- February 26, 1858 – Lavinia Lloyd Dock born, American nurse, educator, feminist, and social activist; founder of the American Red Cross Nursing Service; contributing editor to the American Journal of Nursing; author of a four-volume history of nursing and a pioneering nurse’s manual of drugs, which became the standard manual for many years.
- February 26, 1859 – Louise Bowen born, Chicago philanthropist, saved Hull House financially in 1935, funded the Woman’s Club building, demanded removal of health hazards from Pullman Company, obtained minimum wage for women at International Harvester Company and raised $12,000 for families of strikers.
- February 26, 1893 – Dorothy Whipple born, English novelist and children’s author. Noted for They Were Sisters; The Priory; and They Knew Mr. Knight.
- February 26, 1900 – Halina Konopacka born, Polish athlete, writer, and poet; the first Polish Olympic champion, winning the women’s discus throw at the 1928 Olympic Games. She wrote her first book of poetry, Któregoś dnia (Some Day), in 1929, and was a regular contributor to Polish literary publications. At the onset of WWII, she helped her husband, Ignacy Matuszewski, and Henryk Floyar-Rajchman, on a secret mission to evacuate the gold reserves, 75 tons of gold, of the Polish National Bank to France to help finance the Polish government-in-exile. After France surrendered to the Nazis in 1940, the couple sought refuge in the U.S., finally arriving by a circuitous route in 1941. Her husband died suddenly in New York in 1946, and she worked at a series of jobs before remarrying in 1949. Widowed a second time in 1959, she moved to Florida and took up painting. She died there in January, 1989. The Polish government posthumously awarded her the Silver Cross of Merit.
- February 26, 1908 – Leela Majumdar born, Indian Begali writer, scholar and All India Radio producer.
- February 26, 1909 – Fanny Cradock born as Phyllis Pechey, English television chef, restaurant critic, and writer. She was co-author with her husband of the column "Bon Viveur" for The Daily Telegraph (1950-1955), which led to her variously named cookery shows for the BBC (1955-1975). Cradock wrote novels and children’s books under the pen name Frances Dale, and published cook books as Fanny Cradock, several co-authored with John Cradock.
- February 26, 1915 – Elisabeth Eybers born, South African poet who mainly wrote in Afrikaans, although she translated some of her own poems, as well as those of other Afrikaans poets, into English. Noted for Die Ander Dors (The other thirst), and Kruis of Munt (Head or tail). She moved to Amsterdam in 1966, remaining there the rest of her life.
- February 26, 1921 – Wilma Heide born, American feminist, educator, and women’s studies pioneer; president of NOW (1971- 72); spearheaded sex discrimination charges against ATT.
- February 26, 1944 – First woman U.S. Navy captain: Sue Dauser of nurse corps is appointed. She became a Navy Nurse in 1917 during WWI, and went on to serve as the Superintendent of the Navy Nurse Corps during WWII (1939-1945).
- February 26, 1947 – Sandie Shaw born, British pop singer who also acted on stage and wrote children’s books, then became a psychotherapist. She mentored younger performers, and sang the title song of the movie Made in Dagenham. In 2012, Shaw joined an Amnesty International campaign to end human rights abuses in Azerbaijan, and spoke out in support of independent journalists in Azerbaijan who were being persecuted by the government. She was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2017 Birthday Honours for her services to music.
- February 26, 1948 – Sharon McCrumb born, American Appalachian “Ballad” novelist, and author of the Elizabeth MacPherson mystery series, whose books are often either about or set in the Appalachian region.
- February 26, 1949 – Elizabeth George born, American author of mystery novels set in Great Britain; best known for her Inspector Thomas Lynley series; adapted as a BBC television series in 2001.
- February 26, 1949 – Dame Emma Kirkby born, English soprano and world-renowned early music specialist, who made well over 100 recordings, including the Gothic Voices of sequences of Hildegard of Bingen, A Feather on the Breath of God (1981); and George Frideric Handel's Messiah, conducted by Christopher Hogwood (1980), which was named as one of the top 20 recordings of all time by BBC Music Magazine.
- February 26, 1950 – Helen Clark born, New Zealand politician, second woman to be Prime Minister of New Zealand (1999-2008).
- February 26, 1958 – Susan Helms born, U.S Air Force Lt. General and NASA Astronaut, crew member on five Space Shuttle missions and lived aboard the International Space Station for over five months in 2001; with Jim Voss, she is the co-holder of the international record for longest spacewalk, 8 hours and 56 minutes.
- February 26, 1971 – Hélène Ségara born as Hélène Rizzo, French singer-songwriter; her debut album, Cœur de verre (Glass Heart), brought her attention, but her big break came in 1998 when she was cast as Esmeralda in the musical Notre Dame de Paris. Her singing voice survived a laser operation to remove a cyst from her vocal cords, and in 2000 she was able to record her album, Au Nom d'une femme (In a Woman’s Name). She is a supporter of several charities, including Rêves, Les Restos du Cœur, Les Enfants de la Terre et e-enfance, and has been an ambassador for Rêves since 1998.
- February 26, 1974 – Lola Shoneyin born, Nigerian poet and author, known for her debut novel, The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives, and her poetry collections, So All the Time I was Sitting on an Egg; Song of a River Bird; and For the Love of Flight. She runs the annual Aké Arts and Book Festival in Lagos.
- February 26, 1974 – Irina Vlah born, Moldovan politician; Governor of Autonomous Territorial Unit of Gagauzia since 2015; Member of Moldovan Parliament (2005-2009).
- February 26, 1976 – Nalini Anantharaman born, French mathematician; Professor at Université de Strasbourg since 2014; In 2018, she was awarded the Infosys Mathematical Sciences Prize for work on “Quantum Chaos.” She won the 2011 Salem Prize for her work on the Fourier Series; co-winner in 2012 of the Henri Poincaré Prize for mathematical physics for her work in “quantum chaos, dynamical systems and Schrödinger equation, including a remarkable advance in the problem of quantum unique ergodicity.” Also in 2011, she took the Grand Prix Jacques Herbrand from the French Academy of Sciences.
- February 26, 1989 – Dita Přikrylová born, Czech software engineer, and founder of Czechitas, a non-profit organization based upon Girls Who Code, which provides technical education and networking possibilities for women and youth in information technologies. Přikrylová was the only Czech participant in the worldwide 2016 Young Transatlantic Innovation Leaders Initiative (YTILI) held by the U.S. Department of State, and the Global Entrepreneurship Summit. Best known for her focus in retraining women between ages 20 and 45 in coding and information technol0gy, and overcoming stereotypes and encouraging women and girls to move into IT careers. In 20-16, she cofounded Powercoders, a Swiss-based non-profit which teaches refugees coding skills to improve their employment prospects, and was awarded the European Citizen's Prize by the European Parliament for her efforts to increase women's and girls' technical and digital literacy.
- February 26, 1998 – A Texas jury rejects an $11 million lawsuit by Texas cattlemen, blaming Oprah Winfrey for the price drop on beef after her on-air comment about mad-cow disease.
- February 26, 2019 – Delegates at a conference of the United Methodist Church, the second biggest U.S. Protestant denomination, voted to strengthen bans on same-sex marriage and ordination of LGBT clergy. Conservatives from the U.S. and overseas pushed through the so-called ‘Traditional Plan’ and defeated a rival proposal to let regional and local church bodies determine whether to adopt more gay-friendly policies. "The church in Africa would cease to exist" if the bans were eased, said the Rev. Jerry Kulah of Liberia. Council of Bishops President Kenneth H. Carter said he feared progressive churches would now leave the denomination. Former Methodist pastor Rebecca Wilson called the vote devastating. "As someone who left because I'm gay," she said, "I'm waiting for the church I love to stop bringing more hate."
- February 26, 2020 – UN Secretary-General António Guterres called for men everywhere to support women’s rights. In a speech to faculty and students at The New School in New York City, he declared, “Just as slavery and colonialism were a stain on previous centuries, women’s inequality should shame us all in the 21st. Because it is not only unacceptable; it is stupid. From the ridiculing of women as hysterical or hormonal, to the routine judgement of women based on their looks; from the myths and taboos that surround women’s natural bodily functions, to mansplaining and victim-blaming – misogyny is everywhere.” He pointed out that patriarchy also has an impact on men and boys, trapping them in rigid gender stereotypes, declaring that a systemic change is long overdue. “It is time to stop trying to change women, and start changing the systems that prevent them from achieving their potential. Our power structures have evolved gradually over thousands of years. One further evolution is long overdue. The 21st century must be the century of women’s equality,” he said. “We must urgently transform and redistribute power, if we are to safeguard our future and our planet. That is why all men should support women’s rights and gender equality. And that is why I am a proud feminist.”
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- February 27, 1667 – Princess Ludwika Karolina Radziwiłł born, magnate Princess of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, who was a social reformer. She was orphaned as a child, and inherited considerable wealth from both her father and mother. Her guardianship was entrusted to her father's cousin (who would be her first father-in-law) Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg. She funded the printing of books in the Lithuanian language, and financially supported education. She established scholarships for Lithuanian students of theology in the universities of Königsberg, Frankfurt am Oder, and Berlin. Radziwiłł also financed the issue of a catechism and primer in the Lithuanian language used in primary schools. She married twice, first in 1681, but her first husband died just six years later, and they had no children. She married her second husband, who became Charles III Philip, Elector Palatine, and they had four children, but only their daughter Elisabeth survived beyond childhood.
- February 27, 1847 – Ellen Terry born, British stage actress, leading Shakespearean actress of her day; after retiring from the stage, she gave lectures on Shakespeare’s woman and child characters, and the use of letters in his plays.
- February 27, 1850 – Laura Howe Richards born, American author, poet and biographer.
- February 27, 1854 – Elizabeth Almira Allen born, American teacher for 48 years, and the first woman president of the New Jersey Education Association. As an advocate for teachers’ pensions, Allen was instrumental in the passage in 1896 of the first statewide teacher retirement law in the U.S., passed by the New Jersey state legislature. The bill provided for a half-pay annuity to teachers with at least 20 years of service who were no longer able to work, but it was a voluntary plan, with contributions taken from teacher salaries. Allen launched a campaign to enroll as many teachers as possible, and within three months, she and her team had enrolled over half of the state’s teachers. Allen served as the first secretary of the Teachers’ Retirement Fund.
- February 27, 1859 – Bertha Pappenheim born, Austrian-Jewish feminist and author (anonymously and as “P. Berthold”), became the director of an orphanage for Jewish girls, changing the curriculum from preparation for marriage to vocational training; founding member and first president of the Jüdischer Frauenbund (Jewish Women’s Association); translated Mary Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" into German; advocate for women’s education and equal rights, and activist against the trafficking of women; co-founder of the Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle der Juden in Deutschland (Central Welfare Agency of German Jewry).
- February 27, 1869 – Alice Hamilton born, American pathologist, research scientist, and physician; the first woman appointed to the faculty of Harvard University, and pioneer in the field of toxicology. She focused on occupational illnesses and the dangers of exposure to industrial metals and chemical compounds. In 1911, she was appointed as a special investigator for the U.S. Bureau of Labor, inspecting mines, mills and smelters. She compiled statistics, beginning with lead, the poison most widely used by industry, which dramatically documented the high mortality and morbidity rates of exposed workers. She followed this by compiling statistics on aniline dyes, picric acid, arsenic, carbon monoxide, and many other industrial poisons and work hazards. Her work contributed greatly to the passage of workmen's compensation laws and to the development of safer working conditions. Hamilton was president of the National Consumers League (1944-1949). She was also an activist in social welfare reform and the peace movement, and a volunteer at Chicago's Hull House. She lived to be 101 years old.
- February 27, 1872 – Charlotte E. Ray becomes the first woman graduate from Howard University School of Law, and the first African American woman lawyer. Ray opened her own law office, advertising in a newspaper run by Frederick Douglass, but she practiced law for only a few years because prejudice against African Americans and women made her business unsustainable. Ray eventually moved to New York, where she became a teacher in Brooklyn. She was involved in the women's suffrage movement and was a member of the National Association of Colored Women.
- February 27, 1877 – Adela Verne born, English composer; considered the greatest woman pianist of her era; also noted for composing a march dedicated to Elizabeth, the Queen Mother.
- February 27, 1890 – Mabel Staupers born in Barbados,1917 graduate of Freedman’s Hospital of Nursing (now Howard University), led Harlem Committee of NY Tuberculosis and Health Association, organized health education, public lectures, free exams and dental care for school children, and fought, with help from Ohio Representative Frances Bolton, for full racial integration of U.S. Army and Navy nurses.
- February 27, 1897 – Marian Anderson born, African-American contralto, who achieved European fame prior to her American popularity, largely due to racial prejudice. In 1939, Howard University trief to hire the DAR’s Constitution Hall for a Marian Anderson concert, the only venue in Washington DC large enough to hold the expected crowd. The Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow a black performer to appear on their stage. Many DAR members resigned, including First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who wrote about it in her weekly column, gaining world-wide attention. Supported by the First Lady and FDR, an open air concert in front of the Lincoln Memorial was arranged; Marian Anderson sang for an interracial crowd of 75,000 and a radio audience of millions, opening with “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” In 1964, she began her final concert tour on the stage at Constitution Hall.
- February 27, 1912 – Johanna Catharina Jacoba Cornelius born, South African organizer for the Garment Worker’s Union (GWU); elected as GWU president (1934-1935); GWU general secretary (1952-1974).
- February 27, 1922 – U.S. Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision in Leser v. Garnett, upholds the principle that the 19th Amendment guarantees all American women the right to vote; Judge Oscar Leser had sued to have the names of two women, Cecelia Street Waters and Mary D. Randolph, removed from the voting rolls in Baltimore because the Maryland Constitution limited suffrage to men, and the Maryland legislature had refused to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment. Justice Louis Brandeis wrote: “This amendment is in character and phraseology precisely similar to the Fifteenth. For each the same method of adoption was pursued. One cannot be valid and the other invalid. That the Fifteenth is valid, although rejected by six states, including Maryland, has been recognized and acted on for half a century.” The Supreme Court’s decision insured that the right to vote could actually be used by American women, as citizens of the United States, no matter what state they live in.
- February 27, 1924 – Samella Sanders Lewis born, artist, and art historian; first African American woman to earn a degree in fine arts and art history; founder of Contemporary Crafts in 1969, the first black-owned art publishing house.
- February 27, 1925 – Pía Sebastiani born, Argentine pianist and composer; as a composer, best known for her composition for piano and orchestra; as a pianist, she was noted for her performances of Beethoven piano concertos.
- February 27, 1930 – Joanne Woodward born, American actress, producer, stage director, and philanthropist. Woodward was nominated four times for Best Actress Oscars, and won in 1958 for The Three Faces of Eve. Co-founder with her husband Paul Newman of the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp in 1988, a non-profit residential summer camp, and year-round center providing free services to thousands of children with cancer and other serious conditions, and to their families. In 1994, she and her husband were jointly presented with the Award for Greatest Public Service Benefiting the Disadvantaged by the Jefferson Awards of the American Institute for Public Service.
- February 27, 1932 – Elizabeth Taylor born in London, American movie star, Academy Award winning actress, and notable humanitarian; one of the first celebrities to be an HIV/AIDS activist, as a co-founder of the American Foundation for AIDS Research in 1985, and the founder of the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation in 1991. She was also a supporter of the Jewish National Fund, and on the board of trustees of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
- February 27, 1933 –The first woman in U.S. Cabinet: Frances Perkins is appointed by Franklin Roosevelt as Secretary of Labor; she was a key figure in the making of FDR’s New Deal.
- February 27, 1936 – Sonia Johnson born, American feminist, activist and writer; outspoken supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment and vocal critic of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) which led to her excommunication from the church. Born a fifth-generation Mormon, she began speaking in favor of the ERA in 1977, and co-founded Mormons for ERA. In 1978, she testified before the U.S. Senate Subcomittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Property Rights. The church began disciplinary proceedings against Johnson after she delivered her speech "Patriarchal Panic: Sexual Politics in the Mormon Church" at a meeting of the American Psychological Association (APA) in New York City in September 1979, denouncing the nationwide lobbying efforts of the LDS church to prevent passage of the ERA. Her husband divorced her in October 1979. In December 1979, she was charged with hindering the LDS worldwide missionary program, damaging Mormon social programs, and teaching false doctrine, and was excommunicated. She ran in 1984 as the U.S. Citizens Party candidate for President, but only received 72,161 votes, which left her bitter and disillusioned. Among her books are From Housewife to Heretic, and Going Out of Our Minds: The Metaphysics of Liberation, in which she rejects all efforts to improve the lives of women through legislation and government, likening the male-dominated State to an abusive husband, alternately battering and rewarding women to keep them under control.
- February 27, 1942 – Charlayne Hunter-Gault born, African American journalist and foreign correspondent for National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service.
- February 27, 1950 – Julia Schwab Neuberger born, Baroness Neuberger, she was the second English woman rabbi, and the first to become senior rabbi of a congregation. Liberal politician, appointed DBE (2003). In 2004, she became a Life peer as Baroness Neuberger, of Primrose Hill in London Borough of Camden; served as a Liberal Democrat health spokesperson (2004-2007), but resigned when she was appointed senior rabbi.
- February 27, 1958 – Margaret Wood Hassan born, American attorney and Democratic politician; Governor of New Hampshire (2013-2017); and since 2017, U.S. Senator from New Hampshire.
- February 27, 1971 – Sara Blakely born, American businesswoman, founder of Spanx Inc.
- February 27, 1971 – Chelsea Clinton born, American author, journalist, and global heath advocate; daughter of Bill and Hillary Clinton; special correspondent for NBC News (2011-2014). She has written five books for children on getting involved in social issues and biographies of notable women in history, and co-authored with Devi Sridhar Governing Global Health: Who Runs the World and Why?, a scholarly book on global health policy. She also co-authored The Book of Gutsy Women: Favorite Stories of Courage and Resilience with her mother. Since 2011, she has served as vice chair of the Clinton Foundation, working on improving global health, and creating more opportunities for women.
- February 27, 1971 – The Mildredhuis opened in Arnhem, the first abortion clinic in the Netherlands. The funds to open the clinic were raised by the Foundation for Medically Responsible Pregnancy Interruption (Stimezo). At the time, abortions were technically illegal, but were tolerated if medical quality standards were met. Beginning in 1969, the left-wing feminist action group ‘Dolle Mina’ (‘Mad Mina,’ named for Wilhelmina Drucker, one of the first Dutch feminists) campaigned for the legalization of abortion. The Termination of Pregnancy Act was passed in 1984 in the Netherlands.
- February 27, 1998 – Britain's House of Lords agrees to give a monarch's first-born daughter the same claim to the throne as any first-born son, ending 1,000 years of male primogeniture.
- February 27, 2017 – Irene Clennell, who was born and grew up in Singapore, where her father had fought alongside British troops during WWII, arrived in London in 1988, and married John Clennell, a British citizen, in 1990. She was granted indefinite leave to remain in the UK, and the couple settled in County Durham. They have two children. But after spending long periods back in Singapore caring for her dying parents, her leave to remain lapsed (if the holder spends more than two years cumulatively out of the UK, the leave lapses). She made repeated attempts – in Singapore and back in the UK – to reapply for permission to live with her husband, which were all rejected. After over a month of detention in an immigration removal centre, she was deported to Singapore, without being allowed to say good-bye to her husband of 27 years, their two sons, or her two-year-old granddaughter. Clennell had only the clothes she was wearing, and £12 in her pocket. She was met at the airport by her sister, but the official in Singapore who was supposed to meet her didn’t show up. She stayed at her sister’s cramped apartment, where she had to sleep on the floor. Clennell spoke from Singapore, describing her ordeal, “It is a bloody disgrace; they treat me like a terrorist and anything else under the sun. They embarrass me in front of everybody, the only thing I did wrong was marry a British man and want to stay in the country with my kids and my husband. I have never done wrong to anybody; all I want is my family and this is what I get. The people who escorted me to the airport told me there would be someone to meet up with me but they did not do anything. The officers handed me a letter from the Home Office which says I have exhibited disruptive and violent behaviour. It also says my case is subject to orchestrated public protest.” Clennell had been moved from the North East of England detention centre to Dungavel in Scotland before being deported. The Scottish National Party called on UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd to provide answers, and said they had “very serious concerns about the manner of the deportation.” Joanna Cherry QC MP said, “This case is another example of the inability of the Home Office to take account of special or compassionate circumstances when required, and the human cost of the inflexibility of the UK’s immigration rules. This approach suggests relentless prioritising of the net migration target against a sensible and humane approach to individual cases.” Diane Abbott, the shadow home secretary, said, “Tory anti-immigration policies have gone too far when a woman who is lawfully married, and has lived in the UK most of her adult life, is cruelly separated from her British husband and children. I will be taking this case up with the home secretary.” The Clennell family said they had been overwhelmed by the support of the public, who donated £50,000 to a fundraising page to help Irene fight her case. She used the funds to hire a lawyer, and applied again for a spousal visa. In August 2017, the Home Office approved a new visa for Clennell and allowed her to return to the UK.
- February 27, 2020 – An unidentified senior official at the Department of Health and Human Services said HHS sent over a dozen workers, who had no proper training for infection control or appropriate protective gear, to receive the first Americans evacuated from Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak. The workers were not tested for the virus, according to lawyers for the whistleblower, who oversaw workers at the Administration for Children and Families, a unit within HHS. She sought federal protection, alleging she was unfairly and improperly reassigned after raising concerns about the safety of these workers with HHS officials, including those within the office of Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar. She was told February 19 that if she does not accept the new position in 15 days (by March 5), she would be terminated. The whistleblower has decades of experience in the field, received two HHS department awards from Azar last year and received the highest performance evaluations, her lawyers said. The complaint was filed with the Office of the Special Counsel, an independent federal watchdog agency. The whistleblower's lawyers provided a copy of a redacted 24-page complaint to The Washington Post. A spokesman for the Office of the Special Counsel confirmed that it received the complaint and assigned the case.
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- February 28, 1797 – Mary Lyon born, American educator, founder of Wheaton Female Seminary (now Wheaton College) in Norton, Massachusetts, and the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College).
- February 28, 1882 – Geraldine Farrar born, American soprano and actress; she made a sensational debut at the Berlin Hofoper as Marguerite in Charles Gounod’s Faust in 1901, and appeared in different Eurpean venues until her debut at the NY Metropolitan Opera in Romeo et Juliette in 1906; sang the title role in the first Met production of Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, and remained at the Met until her retirement in 1922.
- February 28, 1897 – Ranavalona III, the last sovereign of the Kingdom of Madagascar, is exiled. She spent her reign, which began in 1883, resisting the colonial designs of France. Ranavalona tried to hold off colonization by strengthening trade and diplomatic relations with other foreign powers throughout her reign, but French attacks on coastal port towns and an assault on the capital city of Antananarivo led to the capture of the royal palace in 1895. She and her court were initially used as figureheads, but a popular resistance movement called the menalamba rebellion, and anti-French political intrigues at her court caused the French to exile Ranavalona to the island of Réunion on this day, formally ending the sovereignty and political autonomy of the century-old kingdom. She, several members of her family, and their servants were later moved to a villa in Algiers. In spite of her repeated requests, Ranavalona was never allowed to return to Madagascar, and she died in Algiers of an embolism in 1917 at age 55.
- February 28, 1898 – Molly Picon born, Yiddish actor, entertained troops in the Pacific Theater during and just after World War II; renowned for performing somersaults and flips well into her seventies, wrote a one-woman show, “Hello, Molly” (1979), and an autobiography, Molly (1980).
- February 28, 1909 – Ketti Frings born as Katherine Hartley; American author, playwright, and screenwriter; she won the 1958 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her adaptation of Thomas Wolfe’s novel Look Homeward, Angel as a play which opened on Broadway in 1957; also known for her 1940 novel, Hold Back the Dawn.
- February 28, 1920 – Jadwiga Piłsudska, Polish pilot, served in the British women’s Air Transport Auxiliary during WWII. In 1937, she began flying gliders and earned a glider pilot's license. In 1939, she graduated from secondary school and decided to study aircraft engineering at the Warsaw Polytechnic. But in September 1939, Poland was invaded by Germany, so she fled with her mother and elder sister to Lithuania, eventually arriving in Britain. In 1940, She resumed her studies, and graduated from Newnham College, Cambridge University in architecture. Later she acquired her aircraft pilot's license, and in July 1942, she joined the Air Transport Auxiliary. After the war, the Communists took over Poland, so she remained in England as a political émigré. Never accepting British citizenship, she used a Nansen passport, valid for all countries in the world, except Poland. In 1990, with the collapse of the Communist government, she returned to Poland and lived in Warsaw, where she died at the age of 94 in 2014.
- February 28, 1928 – Sylvia del Villard born, actress, dancer, choreographer, and Afro-Puerto Rican activist; director of Afro-Puerto Rican Affairs at the Puerto Rican Institute of Culture (1981-1988).
- February 28, 1945 – Linda Preiss Rothschild born, American mathematician and academic; worked on polynomal factorization, partial differential equations, harmonic analysis, and the theory of several complex variables; fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2005.
- February 28, 1948 – Bernadette Peters born as Bernadette Lazzara, American Broadway actress and singer, a two-time Tony Award winner, who has appeared in films and on television. She is also a children’s book author. In 1999, she and Mary Tyler Moore co-founded Broadway Barks, a pet adoption charity which has an annual adopt-a-thon that has made over 2,000 adoptions possible. She also held a combined benefit concert for both Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS and Broadway Barks in 2009 that raised $615,000 for the two charities.
- February 28, 1958 – Natalya Estemirova born, Russian newspaper correspondent, documentary filmmaker, and human rights activist who was a board member of the Russian human rights organization Memorial. She was abducted from her home in 2009, and found shot to death in a wooded area. The Sweden-based human rights organization Civil Rights Defenders named the Natalia Project after Estemirova. The Natalia Project is an alarm and positioning system for human rights defenders at risk. Estemirova’s murder remains officially unsolved.
- February 28, 1959 – Megan McDonald born, American children’s author; noted for her series Judy Moody and The Sisters Club.
- February 28, 2015 – In South Africa, Zephany Nurse, a daughter who had been kidnapped just three days after her birth has been discovered, and the woman who is accused of kidnapping her 17 years earlier is in custody. The bereft parents, Morné and Celeste Nurse, never gave up hope of finding Zephany, their first-born child, and celebrated 17 birthdays without her. The girl grew up just a couple of miles away with a different name and a different family, never suspecting they were not her real parents. But in January, 2015, her biological sister, Cassidy Nurse, began attending the same school, and soon fellow pupils noticed a startling resemblance between them. When Morné Nurse saw the two girls together, she contacted the police. DNA tests confirmed that Zephany was the Nurses’ long-lost daughter. She is now in the care of social workers while the woman who allegedly kidnapped and raised her has been arrested and charged.
- February 28, 2020 – Police and protesters clashed briefly outside the French “Oscars” ceremony as the Franco-Polish film director Roman Polanski was awarded the prize for best director. Immediately after the announcement, there was shouting and booing among the audience, and the two actors who announced the award quickly left the stage. More than 100 angry protestors had gathered to demonstrate against the award going to the controversial director, who is still wanted in the U.S. after pleading guilty to the statutory rape of a 13-year-old and then fleeing the country before being sentenced in 1977. Even after Polanski announced he would not be attending the Césars awards ceremony for fear of what he described as a “public lynching,” protesters gathered outside the venue to vent their fury at his film J’Accuse (marketed in English as An Officer and a Spy) being nominated for 12 awards. In November 2019, just before the official release of the film in France, Polanski faced accusations of rape by French actress Valentine Monnier, who alleged he violently raped her in Switzerland in 1975 when she was 18 years old. Monnier said, “Rape is a time bomb. The memory does not fade. It becomes a ghost and it follows you, and it changes you insidiously. I denounce this crime knowing that there can’t be any punishment, in an attempt to end exceptions, impunity. Public figures are being considered as models. By idolizing the guilty ones, we prevent people from realizing the serious consequences of their acts.” The actress noted that she previously revealed the alleged incident in letters to French first lady Brigitte Macron and the Los Angeles Police Department. Monnier is the fourth woman to accuse Polanski of sexual assault. Upon the film’s release, French feminist groups invaded or blockaded several cinemas, resulting in the film being yanked from some venues.
- February 28, 2020 – Over 15,000 people in Bristol, England, including many children skipping school, turned out to join a climate strike headed by Greta Thunberg. The big crowd endured heavy rain to hear the 17-year-old activist speak, “Once again they sweep their mess under the rug for us – young people, their children – to clean up for them. We must continue and we have to be patient. Remember that the changes required will not happen overnight . . . We will not be silenced because we are the change, and change is coming whether you like it or not. This emergency is being completely ignored by the politicians, the media and those in power. Basically, nothing is being done to halt this crisis despite all the beautiful words and promises from our elected officials. So what did you do during this crucial time? I will not be silenced when the world is on fire.” Thunberg cited the recent decision by north Somerset council to oppose Bristol airport expansion as an example of what could be achieved if activists worked together. She joined the protesters in a march through the city’s center. Ten-year-old Emily Thomson, accompanied by her mother, said, “I think it’s really important that people understand what is happening to the Earth.” Emily returned to school after the event to give a presentation on climate change.
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- February 29, 1736 – Mother Ann Lee born in Great Britain, founder and first leader of the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Coming, more commonly known as the Shakers, who moved to America in 1774.
- February 29, 1828 – Emmeline B. Wells born, American journalist, editor, poet, women’s rights advocate, diarist, and Mormon plural wife. She served as General President (1910-1921) of the Relief Society of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints). She represented the state of Utah at both the National and American Women's Suffrage conventions and was president of the Utah Woman's Suffrage Association. She was the editor (1877-1914) of the Women's Exponent, a newspaper aimed at Mormon women, which was not an official publication of the church, but was closely tied to the Relief Society.
- February 29, 1892 – Augusta Savage born as Augusta Fells, African-American sculptor associated with the Harlem Renaissance; she also mentored and taught many younger artists, and worked for equal rights for African Americans in the arts.
- February 29, 1916 – Dinah Shore born as Fannye Rose Shore; American singer, actress, radio and television musical variety show host, and long-time supporter of women’s professional golf. She helped found the Dinah Shore Golf Tournament in 1972, which is now one of the major women’s golf tournaments, although now under a different name. She also broke the gender barrier at Hillcrest Country Club in Los Angeles, becoming its first woman member around 1969-1970.
- February 29, 1928 – Jean Adamson born, British author and illustrator of children’s books, best known for her Topsy and Tim books.
- February 29, 1940 – Hattie McDaniel becomes the first African American to win an Academy Award, as Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Mammy in the 1939 film Gone With the Wind.
- February 29, 1944 – Ene Ergma born, Estonian scientist and politician; professor of Astronomy at the University of Tartu (1988-2003); most of her scientific research was on the evolution of the compact objects (such as white dwarfs and neutron stars) and gamma ray bursts. Ergma was President of the Riigikogu (2003-2006). The Riigikogu is the Estonian parliament. She was a Second Vice-President of the Riigikogu (2006-2007), then was elected again as President of the Riigikogu (2007-2014). She is the chair of the Space Research Committee of the Riigikogu.
- February 29, 1948 – Dame Hermione Lee born in Hampshire, then grew up in London, academic and biographer, particularly of women writers. President of Wolfson College, Oxford (2008-2017); Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature (1998-2008)) at the University of Oxford. She became the first woman professorial fellow of New College. She is also a fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature.
- February 29, 1948 – Patricia A. McKillip born, American author of fantasy and science fiction; her first novel, The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, won the 1974 World Fantasy Award – Novel, and she won it again for Ombria in Shadow in 2003. Harpers in the Wind won the 1980 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel. She won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award in 1995 for Something Rich and Strange, and in 2007 for Solstice Wood.
- February 29, 1952 – Sharon Raiford Bush born, African-American television newscaster and print journalist; correspondent and executive producer for Black Entertainment Television.
- February 29, 1964 – In Sydney, Australian swimmer Dawn Fraser sets a new world record in the 100-meter freestyle swimming competition of 58.9 seconds. She went on to be elected to the New South Wales Legislative Assembly representing Balmain (1988-1991).
- February 29, 1984 – Lena Raine born, American composer and producer, best known for her work on the soundtracks for video games, including Celeste; Guild Wars 2; Minecraft; and Chicory: A Colorful Tale. She was awarded the ASCAP Video Game Score of the Year in 2019. Raine also released her debut music album, Oneknowing, in 2019.
- February 29, 2020 – The deal between the U.S. and the Taliban may pave the way for peace in Afghanistan, but there are huge risks for women’s rights in the process. Women suffered greatly during Afghanistan’s 40 years of war, but they also fought ferociously for equality in the years since the fall of the Taliban government in 2001. There are now women ministers, governors, judges, and police and soldiers. Afghanistan’s parliament has a higher percentage of women than does the US Congress. But Afghan women’s rights activists have faced resistance from the Afghan government — and lack of support from international donors — as they fought for their rightful place at the negotiating table for peace talks. This exclusion, combined with the Taliban’s relentless discrimination against women and girls, increases fears that women’s rights could easily be a casualty of this process. The US-Taliban deal focuses on foreign troop withdrawal and preventing Taliban support for international terrorism attacks. It also triggers “intra-Afghan” talks between the Taliban, the Afghan government, and other factions, slated to start in March. But women’s rights were not included in the deal. Zalmay Khalilzad, the lead U.S. envoy, repeatedly said that women’s rights — and other issues relating to human rights, political structures, and power sharing — should be resolved through the subsequent intra-Afghan talks. The Taliban’s 1996 to 2001 regime was notorious for denying women and girls access to education, employment, freedom of movement, and health care, and subjecting them to violence – including public lashing or execution by stoning. Though some Taliban commanders, under community pressure, have permitted girls to attend primary school, others have continued to carry out violent attacks against girls’ schools. A Taliban leader declared, “[W]e together will find a way to build an Islamic system in which all Afghans have equal rights, where the rights of women that are granted by Islam — from the right to education to the right to work — are protected.” Skeptics have noted the comma separating women from equal rights, and that from 1996 to 2001 the Taliban also argued that women were enjoying all rights “granted by Islam.”
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