WOW2 is now a four-times-a-month sister blog to This Week in the War on Women. This edition covers women and events from July 17 through July 24.
The next WOW2 edition will post on Saturday, July 31.
The purpose of WOW2 is to learn about and honor women of achievement, including many who’ve been ignored or marginalized in most of the history books, and to mark moments in women’s history. It also serves as a reference archive of women’s history. There are so many more phenomenal women than I ever dreamed of finding, and all too often their stories are almost unknown, even to feminists and scholars.
THIS WEEK IN THE WAR ON WOMEN
will post shortly, so be sure to go there next, and
catch up on the latest dispatches from the frontlines.
Many thanks to libera nos, intrepid Assistant Editor of WOW2. Any remaining mistakes are either mine, or uncaught computer glitches in transferring the data from his emails to DK5. And 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.
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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- July 17, 1762 – In Russia, just eight days after the very unpopular Peter III was overthrown in a coup d’état, he died in captivity, under disputed circumstances. Catherine the Great, who may, or may not, have been part of the conspiracy to remove him, becomes the Empress regnant of All Russia (1762-1796).
- July 17, 1794 – Sixteen Carmelite nuns, lay sisters, and externs become the Martyrs of Compiègne, and are executed ten days prior to the end of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror for refusing to obey the Civil Constitution of the Clergy of the Revolutionary government, which mandated the suppression of monasteries and convents.
- July 17, 1819 – Eunice Newton Foote born, American scientist, botanist, inventor, and women’s rights campaigner. She was educated at the Troy Female Seminary (1836-1837), later renamed the Emma Willard School, where students could attend classes at a nearby science college, which gave her a foundation in chemistry and biology. She also read the textbooks of Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps, a pioneering woman scientist and botany expert. Foote was a member of the editorial committee for the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, and one of the signers of the convention’s Declaration of Sentiments, as was her husband, Elisha Foote. He was a judge, statistician, inventor, and author of books on mathematics. They were married in 1841. Eunice Foote was the first scientist known to conduct experiments on the warming effect of sunlight on different gases. In her paper Circumstances affecting the heat of the sun's rays, she theorized that changing the proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would change its temperature. Her theory was presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in 1856. Although some women had been allowed to present papers to AAAS, it was Professor Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian Institution who delivered the paper that identified the research as her work. Her paper was then published under her name in the American Journal of Science and Arts, and her findings were reported in the New York Daily Tribune, Scientific American, and mentioned in scientific publications in Canada, Scotland, and Germany, but were miscredited to her husband Elisha by the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal. Three years later, John Tyndall reported his research, based on experiments with more sophisticated equipment than Foote’s, which showed that various gases both trapped and emitted infrared thermal radiation rather than sunlight. His work was published by the Proceedings of the Royal Society, where he was a fellow, and is commonly regarded as foundational to climate science. He gave credit to Claude Pouillet's work on solar radiation through the atmosphere, but was either unaware of Foote's work, or didn’t think it was relevant. Foote also worked on electrical excitation of gases and, in August 1857, her work was again published in the Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. As an inventor, Foote received a patent in 1860 for a "filling for soles of boots and shoes" made of "one piece, of vulcanised india-rubber" to "prevent the squeaking of boots and shoes,” and in 1867, she developed a new paper-making machine, described as producing paper that was 'a marked improvement on the ordinary sorts in respect to strength, smoothness and facility for tearing evenly.' Only 16 papers in physics were published by American women in the 19th century, and Eunice Foote’s papers were the only two published before 1889. However, her contributions were quickly forgotten because Foote was an amateur and a woman. In 2010, retired petroleum geologist Ray Sorenson came across Foote's work in an 1857 volume of Annual Scientific Discovery. He quickly realized that Foote was the first to make the connection between carbon dioxide and climate change, and that her work had gone unrecognized. In January 2011, Sorenson published his findings on Foote in the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) Search and Discovery, where it received "more response than any of his other work."
- July 17, 1898 – Berenice Abbott born, photographer, artist, teacher, and writer; famous for her portraitures; for her black-and-white photographs in “Changing New York” which documented New York City’s architecture; and for science photography.
- July 17, 1902 – Christina Stead born, Australian novelist and short-story writer known for her wit and insightful psychological characterizations; she left Australia in 1928, and worked in Paris for a time at a bank (1930-1935), where she also published her first novel, Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934); she became a Marxist, and spent time in Spain just before the Spanish Civil War broke out; she returned to Australia in 1968; her best-known book is The Man Who Loved Children.
- July 17, 1908 – Carmelita Maracci born, dancer, choreographer, and teacher, created a blend of ballet and Spanish dance techniques.
- July 17, 1914 – Eleanor Steber born, American soprano, best known for her performances of starring roles in operas by Mozart and Richard Strauss, but memorable as well in operas by Samuel Barber, Wagner, and Puccini. She was one of the first opera stars trained in the U.S. and making her debut in her home country, who also achieved international success, notably at the Bayreuth Wagner Festival.
- July 17, 1917 – Christiane Rochefort born, French journalist and author, press attaché to the Cannes Film Festival; her novel Le Repos du guerrier (The Warrior’s Rest) was a bestseller.
- July 17, 1917 – Phyllis Diller born, American stand-up comedian, author and film and television performer; one of the first women comics to become a U.S. household name, paving the way for the success of other women comedians like Joan Rivers and Ellen DeGeneres. Her best-selling books include Phyllis Diller’s Housekeeping Hints, Phyllis Diller’s Marriage Manual, and The Joys of Aging & How to Avoid Them. In 2006, she published her autobiography, Like a Lampshade in a Whorehouse – My Life in Comedy, co-authored with Richard Buskin.
- July 17, 1921 – Hannah Szenes born, Hungarian poet who wrote in both Hungarian and Hebrew. She had immigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine in 1939, and joined the paramilitary Haganah in 1941. She was one of the Mandate Palestine volunteers who joined the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) during WWII. She parachuted with two colleagues into Yugoslavia on March 14, 1944, to help local anti-Nazi forces, hoping to rescue Hungarian Jews, but the mission became far more dangerous because the Germans occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944. Szenes nevertheless continued to the Hungarian border, where she was arrested when her British military transmitter was discovered. She was imprisoned and tortured, but refused to reveal details of her mission, or the transmitter codes. She was tried in October, 1944, and executed by firing squad on November 7, 1944. She is regarded as a national heroine in Israel, where her poetry is widely known, and several streets are named after her.
- July 17, 1921 – Mary Osborne born, American jazz guitarist and guitar manufacturer. In the 1940s, she played with jazz greats like Dizzy Gillespie, Art Tatum, Coleman Hawkins, and Thelonious Monk, and led her own trio (1945-1948). In 1968, she and her husband, trumpeter Ralph Scaffidi, founded the Osborne Guitar Company, and played mostly at jazz festivals in the 1970s and 1980s. She died at age 70 from chronic leukemia in 1992.
- July 17, 1921 – Toni Stone born, first of three women to play Negro league baseball; played professionally from 1949 to 1953 when she quit to be a nurse and care for her ill husband.
- July 17, 1923 – Jeanne H. Block born, American psychologist who researched sex-role socialization; with her husband Jack, she created a person-centered personality framework; fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
- July 17, 1924 – Olive Ann Burns born, American author and journalist, wrote for Atlanta Journal; pseudonym Amy Larkin; novel Cold Sassy Tree.
- July 17, 1932 – Karla Kuskin born, prolific American children’s author, poet, illustrator, and children’s book reviewer for the New York Times Book Review. Kushin sometimes published under the pen name Nicholas J. Charles. She illustrated almost half of the many books she wrote, including Roar and More, The Rose on My Cake, and Soap Soup.
- July 17, 1935 – Diahann Carroll born, American stage, film and television actor-singer, starred on Broadway, in early films casting black actors, and in Julia, one of the first television series starring an African American woman; recipient of many awards and honors; co-founder of Celebrity Action Council for the Los Angeles Mission; she was the co-organizer with James Garner of Hollywood’s large-scale turnout for the 1963 March on Washington, in spite of attempts by J. Edgar Hoover to intimidate Hollywood’s elite with phone calls claiming the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement were all Communists.
- July 17, 1943 – LaVyrle Spencer born, American author of atypical romance novels from the 1970s to the 1990s, featuring “ordinary” people and “nice men,” beginning with The Fullfillment, a novel based on her grandmother’s life on a Minnesota farm. Her second and third books were initially rejected by the publishers –Hummingbird for having “too much humor,” and her third book, The Endearment, because the hero, not the heroine, was the virgin, and he was also her protagonist. She retired after writing twenty-three books, which all sold millions of copies, having reached the financial goal she had set for herself when she first began writing.
- July 17, 1950 – Phoebe Snow, American singer-songwriter with a four-octave contralto voice, best remembered for her song, “Poetry Man.” Her first album, Phoebe Snow, was released in 1974, and was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best New Artist. But in 1975, her daughter was born with severe brain damage. Snow refused to institutionalize her, caring for her at home until her daughter died in 2007. Her marriage ended in 1978, and Snow’s career also nearly ended. She had to spend long periods away from recording, and often worked on commercial jingles to support herself and her daughter, including the “Cotton, the Fabric of Our Lives” campaign. In January, 2010, Snow suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, slipping into a coma, and died on April 26, 2011.
- July 17, 1954 – Angela Merkel born, German chemist and politician; Chancellor of Germany since 2005; she has been the leader of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) since 2000. She announced in 2018 that she would not seek a fifth term as Chancellor in 2021.
- July 17, 1956 – Julie I. Bishop born, Australian politician; Minister for Foreign Affairs since 2013; Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party since 2007. In February, 2019, she announced she would be retiring at the next election.
- July 17, 1957 – Wendy L. Freedman born in Canada, Canadian-American astronomer and astrophysicist, best known for her measurement of the Hubble constant (the rate at which astronomical objects are receding from Earth’s position because of the expansion of the universe); currently Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago; initiated and served on the board of directors of the Giant Magellan Telescope Project (2003-2015); member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; co-recipient of the 2009 Gruber Cosmology Prize, and honored with the 2016 Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics.
- July 17, 1958 – Suzanne Moore born, English print journalist, who has written for Marxism Today, The Mail on Sunday, Daily Mail, The Independent, The Guardian, and The New Statesman.
- July 17, 1958 – Thérèse Rein born, Australian founder of Ingeus, an international employment and business psychology services company; married to Kevin Rudd, Prime Minister of Australia (2007-2010). She was the first Prime Minister’s wife to maintain a separate career during her husband’s time in office; long-time activist for human rights, especially for people with disabilities, and patron of numerous charities and rights groups; awarded the 2010 Human Rights Medal by the Australian Human Rights Commission.
- July 17, 1959 – Mary Leakey, British paleoanthropologist, discovers partial skull of a new species of early human ancestor, Zinjanthropus boisei or ‘Zinj’ (now called Paranthropus boisei) which lived in Africa almost 2 million years ago.
- July 17, 1959 – Manzila Pola Uddin born in what is now Bangladesh, Baroness Uddin of Bethnal Green; non-affiliated British politician, and community activist; Life Peer since 1998, the youngest woman on the benches and the only Muslim woman to be appointed to the House of Lords; advocate for women’s equal rights, and people with disabilities rights, and campaigns for increasing opportunities for Asian women to learn skills; founded the Jagonari Centre, which offers education and training programmes.
- July 17, 1960 – Nancy Giles born, African American commentator on CBS News Sunday Morning, co-producer/co-host with Erin Moriarty of two public affairs series for radio, and actress on the television series China Beach.
- July 17, 1960 – Barbara Hall born, American television writer, producer, novelist, and singer-songwriter; created and produced the TV series Judging Amy (1999-2005), Joan of Arcadia (2003-2005), and the Madam Secretary, which began airing in 2014. She was also a founding member of the band ‘The Enablers.’ Hall has also released two solo albums, Handsome (2005) and Bad Man (2013), and written over ten novels for the Young Adult market.
- July 17, 2016 – The killer of Qandeel Baloch, a Pakistani social media star, model, and feminist activist, was her brother, who confessed to the “honor” killing. Baloch, whose real name was Fouzia Azeem, was known for posting provocative photos of herself on Facebook and Instagram. She was the main breadwinner for the family, and had recently sought refuge in her parents' house after receiving death threats for posting a picture of herself with a Muslim cleric. Her brother, Muhammad Wasim Azeem, said he drugged, then strangled her, to restore "family honor." Anwar Azeem, their father, initially said, “. . . he should be shot on sight! He suffocated my little one . . .” but when their other son Aslan was also implicated, he and his wife said they had forgiven both their sons. Muhammad Wasim Azeem was sentenced to life in prison, but four other suspects, including Aslan Azeem, were acquitted. Nearly 1,100 women were murdered in Pakistan in 2016 for violating conservative norms on love and marriage. These so-called "honour killings" are frequently carried out by family members. Such killings are considered murder. Islamic law in Pakistan had allowed a murder victim's family to pardon the killer, which often meant those convicted of “honor” killings escaped punishment, but the 2016 Protection of Women against Violence Act closed some but not all of the legal loopholes in honor killing and domestic violence cases. Because of the outcry over Qandeel Baloch’s murder, the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 2016 repealed allowing perpetrators of honor killings being legally pardoned if they are forgiven for the crime by a family member, and established 14-years-to-life-imprisonment as the punishment for crimes committed “on the pretext of honour.” Nevertheless, these killing have continued at nearly the same numbers, often concealed by the families, and at least one whistle blower who reported a killing was also murdered.
- July 17, 2018 – Italy’s highest court was widely condemned for its ruling that aggravated circumstances cannot be applied to a rape sentence if the victim voluntarily drank alcohol before the attack, and ordered a retrial to review the three-year sentence for two men convicted of raping a woman in 2009. A lower court had applied aggravated circumstances – factors that increase the severity of a criminal act – to the sentence because of the use of alcohol in the attack, but the higher court ruled that this was inapplicable. The decision was castigated by women’s associations and politicians as a “huge step back” for women in Italy. “The position by the court is extremely serious because it makes it even more difficult for a woman to come forward and report a rape,” said Lella Palladino, the president of Italy’s Women Network Against Violence. “When they do find the courage they are regarded as not being credible and in many cases they are the ones victimized.” Alessia Rotta, a politician with the centre-left Democratic party, said: “The ruling from the supreme court takes us back decades … it is a sentence that risks nullifying years of battles.” The two defendants, both aged 50, were initially acquitted of rape by a court in the northern Italian city of Brescia in 2011 after judges found the victim’s account of events unreliable. They were then found guilty on appeal in January 2017 by a court in Turin after judges there evaluated a medical report showing evidence that the woman had tried to resist the attack. The court handed down a three-year sentence to both men while also applying aggravating circumstances because the defendants had “committed the act with the use of alcoholic substances.” The case dates back to 2009, when the men took the woman into a bedroom after eating together and raped her. A few hours later she went to the emergency wing of a hospital and is said to have described what happened “in a confused manner.” Italian courts have made similar decisions in other rape cases. In February, 2017, a man was acquitted by a Turin court of raping a woman on a hospital bed after the judge ruled the woman did not scream loud enough or push the man away.
- July 17, 2020 – The Chinese government has been forcibly slashing the birth rate of ethnic groups within China in a program that began in 2016, especially focusing on the Uighurs, a Turkic ethnic group with a population of about 12.8 million, who live mostly in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of Northwest China. An AP investigation based on government statistics, state documents, interviews with 30 ex-detainees, family members, and a former detention camp instructor, has revealed that the practice is far more widespread and systematic than previously known. Some experts are calling the campaign in Xinjiang “demographic genocide.” The state regularly subjects minority women to pregnancy checks, and forces intrauterine devices, sterilization, and even abortion on hundreds of thousands, the interviews and data show. The population control measures are backed by mass detention both as a threat and as a punishment for failure to comply. Having too many children is a major reason people are sent to detention camps, the AP found, with the parents of three or more ripped away from their families unless they can pay huge fines. Police raid homes, terrifying parents as they search for hidden children. Across the Xinjiang region, birth rates fell nearly 24% in 2019 alone, compared to just a 4.2% decrease nationwide. Meanwhile, the government is encouraging the Han Chinese majority to have more children. The Chinese government has denied the story. “Everyone, regardless of whether they’re an ethnic minority or Han Chinese, must follow and act in accordance with the law,” ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said. While equal on paper, in practice Han Chinese are largely spared the abortions, sterilizations, IUD insertions, and detentions for having too many children that are forced on Xinjiang’s other ethnicities, interviews and data show. In the detention camps, Uighurs are subjected to political and religious re-education, and forced labor in factories, while their children are indoctrinated in orphanages. Gulnar Omirzakh and her sister’s family went deeply into debt to pay the big fine after she gave birth to her third child, to keep her from being sent to a camp, and her children to an orphanage. Uighurs, who are often but not always Muslim, a religion the Chinese government equates with terrorism, are also tracked by a vast digital surveillance apparatus.
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- July 18, 1702 – Maria Clementina Sobieska born, granddaughter of King John III of Poland, was arrested by King George I of Great Britain on the way to her wedding, in an attempt to prevent her from marrying James Francis Edward Stuart (the former Prince of Wales until his father was deposed, who became known as the ‘Old Pretender’), but she escaped and they were quickly married by proxy.
- July 18, 1724 – Duchess Maria Antonia Walpurgis Symphorosa of Bavaria born, Electress of Saxony, singer, composer (initially under a masculine pseudonym), and harpsichordist; her operas, Talestri and Il tionfo della fedeltà (The Triumph of Fidelity) were well received, and her singing and harpsichord performances admired.
- July 18, 1821 – Pauline Viardot born as Michelle Ferdinande Pauline Garcia; French mezzo-soprano, pianist, educator, and composer. She was the youngest child in a musical family. Viardot began performing as a teenager, at first on the piano, and then as a singer, and had a long, illustrious career as a star performer. Franz Liszt considered her a “woman composer of genius.”
- July 18, 1850 – Rose Hartwick Thorpe born, American author and poet, known for her poem ‘Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight.’
- July 18, 1861 – Kadambini Ganguly born, first Indian and first Southeast Asian woman to be trained and graduate in Western medicine in India. She earned a Graduate of Bengal Medical College degree in 1886. (Anandi Gopal Joshi graduated with a medical degree the same year, from the Woman’s College of Pennsylvania in the U.S.) Ganguly continued her medical studies in the United Kingdom, becoming a Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians from the University of Edinburgh, an LRCS from the University of Glasgow, and a GFPS from the University of Dublin. Back in India, she worked for a short period at Lady Dufferin Hospital, then started her private practice. Her husband, Dwarkanath Ganguly, was a reformer and an advocate of women’s emancipation, and they were both involved with the campaign to improve working conditions of women coal miners. She was one of the six women delegates to the fifth session of the Indian National Congress in 1889, and organized and presided over the Women’s Conference in 1906. She was also the mother of eight children. She was much critised by conservatives, and when a conservative magazine lambasted her ceaseless campaign for women’s rights, and indirectly called her a ‘whore,’ she took the case to court, and eventually won. The magazine's editor served a six month jail sentence.
- July 18, 1867 – Margaret Brown born, American philanthropist, socialite, advocate for women’s education and aiding poor children; after she survived the sinking of RMS Titanic, she was known as “The Unsinkable Molly Brown.”
- July 18, 1892 – Doris Fleischman (Bernays) born, the first married woman to gain a U.S. passport in her maiden name (1925); writer and editor for the New York Tribune (1913-1919), and in 1922 became an equal partner with her husband the public relations firm he founded. Their clients included the NAACP, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Sigmund Freud, Jane Addams, Irene Castle, Theodore Roosevelt, and Thomas A. Edison, and later, the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. She was a member of the Lucy Stone League, named for women’s rights activist Lucy Stone, who continued to use her maiden name through the rest of her life after her marriage in 1855. Fleischman wrote An Outline of Careers for Women: A Practical Guide to Achievement in 1928. In 1955, she published her memoir, A Wife Is Many Women, adding her married name. She died at age 88, just eight days before her birthday in 1980.
- July 18, 1895 – Olga Spessivtseva, Russian ballerina, considered one of the outstanding ballerinas of the 20th century; partnered with Nijinsky at the Ballet Russes 1916-1918 and on tours in 1921 and 1923; étoile (prima ballerina) at the Paris Opera 1924-1932, but still performed occasionally with the Ballet Russes; her mental health and career began a long decline 1934-1943; her last performance was in 1939; beginning in 1943, she spent years in mental hospitals.
- July 18, 1900 – Nathalie Sarraute born, French lawyer and author of Russian Jewish origin; she was forced by the Vichy regime’s anti-Jewish laws to quit practicing law in 1941, and went into hiding, dedicating herself to writing; recipient of the Prix international de littérature for her novel The Golden Fruits.
- July 18, 1902 – Jessamyn West born, American short story writer and novelist; best known for her book, The Friendly Persuasion. She won the 1975 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for The Massacre at Fall Creek, awarded by the the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women's Studies and the Department of English at the University of Rochester for the “best book-length work of prose fiction by an American woman.” It is based on the first trial of whites for the murder of Indians. The Woman Said Yes is a memoir of her Quaker mother, her courageous sister, and her own battle with tuberculosis.
- July 18, 1908 – Mildred L. Norman born, American mystic, pacifist activist, and vegetarian, adopted the name ‘Peace Pilgrim’; between 1953 and 1981, she walked across the United States at least six times, and died on her seventh cross-country journey at age 72.
- July 18, 1908 – Beatrice Aitchison born, American a mathematician, academic, civil servant, statistician, and transportation economist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (1936-1939) and the Interstate Commerce Commission (1942-1951); consultant for the Office of Defense Transportation (1942-1944). She was head of the U.S Department of Commerce’s Office of Transportation (1951 to 1953, when it disbanded), then moved to the U.S Postal Service as Director of Transportation Research in its Bureau of Transportation, first woman in the Postal Service appointed to a policy level position. In 1961, was one of the first to be awarded the U.S. Civil Service Commission’s Federal Woman’s Award, and used her recognition to pressure President Johnson to sign an executive order banning sex discrimination in U.S. government. Aitchison retired in 1971 as one of the highest ranking women in federal service.
- July 18, 1915 – Roxana Cannon Arsht born, the daughter of a Russian immigrant, American lawyer and judge. After graduating from law school and passing the bar in 1939, as a married woman she was unable to find work as a lawyer, so she worked for women’s reproductive rights, and helped with the development of Planned Parenthood’s Delaware office. In 1962, she began volunteering as a ‘master’ (hearing civil cases where common law applies) for Delaware Family Court. In 1971, she became the first woman in Delaware to be appointed as a judge, in Delaware Family Court. Arsht retired in 1983, and was the first woman to serve on the Medical Center of Delaware board (1993-1997).
- July 18, 1926 – Margaret Laurence born, Canadian author, founder of the Writers’ Trust of Canada; noted for The Stone Angel and The Diviners; recipient of two Governor General’s Awards, and Companion of the Order of Canada.
- July 18, 1935 – Tenley Albright born, American Olympic champion figure skater and physician; she won Gold in Women’s Figure Skating at the 1956 Winter Olympics on Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, and Silver at the 1952 Winter Olympics in Oslo, Norway. Albright was World Champion in 1953 and 1955. She began figure skating at age 11, as therapy to regain muscle strength after an attack of polio. After retiring from competition in 1956, she graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1961, and went on to become a surgeon. She practiced medicine for 23 years, and also was a faculty member and Lecturer in the Program of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. She also chaired the Board of Regents of the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health, was involved with the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Currently, she serves as Director of MIT Collaborative Initiatives.
- July 18, 1941 – Martha Reeves born, American Rhythm & Blues singer and politician, she was the leader of Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, then went on to a successful solo career. From 2005 to 2009, she was on the Detroit City Council.
- July 18, 1948 – Jeanne Córdova born, pioneering American lesbian and gay rights activist, one of the founders of the West Coast LGBTQ movement. While serving as Los Angeles chapter president of the Daughters of Bilitis, she opened the first lesbian center in Los Angeles, and was publisher and editor of the chapter’s newsletter, The Lesbian Tide, which grew to be regarded as the lesbian feminist “newspaper of record.” It was also the first American publication to use “lesbian” in its name. She was a key organizer of the first West Coast Lesbian Conference at Metropolitan Community Church (1971) and the first National Lesbian Conference at the University of California, Los Angeles (1973). She also sat on the Board of the Los Angeles Gay Community Services Center and became the Human Rights Editor of the progressive weekly, the Los Angeles Free Press (1973–1976). Córdova was elected as a delegate to the first National Women's Conference for International Women's Year in Houston (1977), where she was a moving force behind the passage of the lesbian affirmative action resolution. She was Southern California media director of the ballot campaign to defeat the anti-gay Proposition 6 Briggs Initiative (1978), which sought to purge lesbian and gay teachers from California's public schools. She went on to initiate the National Lesbian Feminist Organization's first convention (1978), and was president of the Stonewall Democratic Club (1979–1981). She is the author of When We Were Outlaws; A Memoir of Love & Revolution, published by Spinsters Ink Books in 2011.
- July 18, 1969 – Elizabeth M. Gilbert born, American author best known for her memoir, Eat, Pray, Love. Her book was on the New York Times Best Seller list for over 187 weeks.
- July 18, 1976 – Nadia Comăneci is first person to score a perfect 10 in Olympic gymnastics.
- July 18, 1989 – The shooting death of actress Rebecca Schaeffer by an obsessed fan. It prompted the California state legislature to pass the first anti-stalking law in the U.S. in 1990.
- July 18, 2005 – An anti-abortion fanatic is sentenced to life in prison for the bombing of an abortion clinic in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed a police officer and gravely injured a nurse.
- July 18, 2019 – Departing UK Prime Minister Theresa May threw down the gauntlet to her successor, pushing for fathers to have more time with their newborns. May says she hopes that better paternity leave, and time off work to care for premature infants, will be one of her lasting legacies as prime minister. She says the status quo is holding back women and reinforcing the gender pay gap. “More often than not it is the mother who cuts her hours or opts to works flexibly, the mother who decides not to go for promotion, the mother who stays at home when the child is ill,” she said. “Much of the gender pay gap can be traced back to the balance of childcare responsibilities, while the lack of women in senior positions is partly caused by the fact that mothers, much more than fathers, are too often expected to juggle careers with caring.” May says that division is not inevitable but that policy is “not sending fathers the correct message when our current leave allowances give women 26 times more leave than men.” The government has launched a consultation on changes to parental leave entitlements, one of May’s last acts as prime minister, which will have to be enacted by her successor. The proposal envisages a longer period of paternity leave, as well as a new neonatal leave entitlement for parents of premature and sick babies who need to spend a prolonged period in hospital. “All too often it is still mothers, not fathers, who shoulder the burden of childcare. So it is clear that we need to do more. The UK has some of the most generous maternity leave allowances in the world, but we only guarantee new dads and same-sex partners a fortnight off work – making it harder for them to bond with their child and care for their partner, and implying that it is the lot of the mother to be the primary caregiver.”
- July 18, 2020 – ‘Naked Athena’ made her appearance during the mass demonstrations in Portland, Oregon, against the police killing of Black people. The demonstrations had grown even larger after Donald Trump deployed militarized federal agents without invitation or permission from the state of Oregon, forces who wore camouflage with no clear identification, and used unmarked cars while making arrests. Athena appeared and faced down armed law enforcement, wearing just a beanie and a face mask. In an interview on the Portland-based podcast Unrefined Sophisticates, in which she only identified herself as ‘Jen,’ she revealed she is a sex worker in her 30s, and a “non-Black person of color.” She said the decision to undress and confront the phalanx of officers happened on the spur of the moment, but that being nude in public is nothing new to her: "I am notoriously naked," she said. She described the moments leading up to the altercation and what happened during the standoff— and said her "yoga poses" were in part the result of being shot in the foot by crowd control munition. "My message, other than my feminine response of wanting to show them what my version of vulnerability looks like . . . was we're all out here, these protesters, [and] the only thing we have in common is, we have masks on and we're out here at night. None of these people have weapons. Empty their pockets, take off their clothes—nobody has weapons here. I just wanted them to see what they're shooting at."
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- July 19, 1553 – Protestant Lady Jane Grey, “Nine Day Queen” of England, is deposed by the Privy Council in favor of Henry VIII’s devoutly Catholic daughter Mary, in spite of Lady Jane being the heir designated by young King Edward VI.
- July 19, 1759 – Marianna Auenbrugger born, Austrian pianist and composer, a student of Joseph Haydn and Antonio Salieri; Salieri publishes her Keyboard Sonata in E-flat at his own expense.
- July 19, 1817 – Mary “Mother” Bickerdyke born, served in the U.S. Civil War as a Union hospital nurse and administrator, who established 300 field hospitals, and continued nursing the wounded during nineteen battles. After the war, she worked at the Home for the Friendless in Chicago, helped the families of veterans become homesteaders in Kansas, and ran a hotel which became known as Bickerdyke House. She went on to become an attorney, helping Union veterans with legal problems, including obtaining their pensions. She also worked for the Salvation Army, and the Women’s Relief Corps of the Grand Army of the Republic, a fraternal order of union veterans. Generals Grant, Sherman, Pope, and Long testified before Congress to help in passing a bill which gave her a special pension of $25 a month for her services during the war. A WWII hospital ship, the SS Mary Bickerdyke, was launched in October 1943.
- July 19, 1848 – Seneca Falls Opening Day: the first day of the Woman’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, NY, a joint vision of Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, both abolitionists, who met at the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. When women were barred from the convention floor, their common indignation at this discrimination became the impetus for their founding of the women’s rights movement in the United States. Organizers for the convention included Martha Wright, Mary Ann McClintock, and Jane Hunt. The first day was women-only. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the key-note speaker. On the second day, men were also invited to attend so they could hear the rest of the speakers, including Lucretia Mott, and the deliberations. www.dailykos.com/...
- July 19, 1875 – Alice Nelson Dunbar born of mixed-race parents, American novelist, poet, essayist and teacher; civil rights and woman’s suffrage activist; part of the Harlem Renaissance; co-editor of the Wilmington Advocate (1920-1921), a progressive black newspaper in Delaware, where she began writing regular columns and articles, but often had to fight to get attribution and payment for them.
- July 19, 1901 – Anna Marie Rosenberg born, American public servant. In 1934, she was chosen to be the assistant to Nathan Straus Jr., New York State Administrator for the National Recovery Act, then she succeeded him when he was appointed as Administrator of the U.S. Housing Authority in 1936. She was a regional director of the Social Security Board (1937-1943), then regional director of the War Manpower Commission until the war ended in 1945. In spite of a smear campaign against her by Senator Joseph McCarthy, she was appointed as Assistant Secretary of Defense (1950-1953), the highest position held by a woman in the Defense Department up to that time. Rosenberg worked to implement the National Security Act, a restructuring of the U.S. military and intelligence agencies; promoted racial integration of the services; and supported legislation that safeguarded the rights of minorities in the military.
- July 19, 1909 – Balamani Amma born, prolific Indian poet who wrote in Malayalam; she was the recipient of the Padma Bhushan, the Republic of India’s third-highest civilian honor, the Sarawati Samman, a literary award for her poetry collection Nivedyam, and the Ezhuthachan Puraskaram, the highest literary honor given by the Kerala Sahitya Akademi, Government of Kerala. Some of her poems were translated by her daughter, notable Indian English-language author Kamala Surayya, who often used the pen name Madhavikutty.
- July 19, 1916 – Eve Merriam born, American poet and playwright, noted for inspiring poetry for children; she was a recipient of the 1946 Yale Younger Poets Prize for her first book Family Circle. She published over 30 books, and wrote the play Out of Our Father’s House. She died in 1992 from liver cancer at age 75.
- July 19, 1921 – Rosalyn Sussman Yalow born, American medical physicist, co-recipient with Roger Guillemin and Andrew Schally of the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine (second woman laureate in the category) for the development of the radioimmuno assay (RIA) technique. RIA is a radioisotope tracing technique which allows measurement of tiny quantities of biological substances in human blood and other aqueous fluids. It brought about a revolution in biological and medical research, and was applied by the laureates to studying the physiology of the peptide hormones insulin, ACTH, and growth hormone. It also threw light upon the pathogenesis of diseases caused by abnormal secretion of these hormones, and opened new directions in diabetes research.
- July 19, 1921 – Elizabeth Spencer born, American novelist and short story writer; Fire in the Morning, The Light in the Piazza, Starting Over; she was honored with the 2007 PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction, the 1992 John Dos Passos Award for Literature, and was a five-time winner of the O. Henry Award for short fiction.
- July 19, 1922 – Carmen Guerrero Nakpil born, Filipina journalist, author, historian, and public servant; she wrote a daily column for the Manila Chronicle for 12 years, until it was shut down by the Marcos regime in 1972. In the 1960s, she served as chair of the Philippine National Historical Commission, and was director-general of the Technology Resource Center (1975-1985). She died of pneumonia at age 96 in 2018.
- July 19, 1922 – Rachel Isum Robinson born, African American registered nurse; in 1957, went back to school for a master’s degree in psychiatric nursing from New York University; researcher and clinician in the Department of Social and Community Psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine; Assistant Professor at Yale School of Nursing; Director of Nursing at the Connecticut Mental Health Center; married to baseball great Jackie Robinson from 1946 until his death in 1972; founder of the Jackie Robinson Development Corporation, a low-to-moderate housing development company, and its president (1972-1982); founder in 1973 of the Jackie Robinson Foundation, a non-profit providing educational opportunities for minority students.
- July 19, 1941 – Neelie Kroes born, Dutch People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) politician, served in the Netherlands House of Representatives (1981-1986), and as Undersecretary (1977-1981), then Minister (1982-1989), of Transport, Public Works and Waste Management. Chancellor of Nyenrode Business University (1991-2000). European Commissioner for Competition (2004-2010), which is the merger and cartel authority for the European Economic Area, responsible for upholding anti-trust laws; European Commissioner for Digital Agenda (2010-2014).
- July 19, 1945 – Paule Baillargeon born, French Canadian film director and actress; nominated for a Genie Award (Canada’s Oscars) for Best Director for her 1993 film Le Sexe des étoiles (The Sex of the Stars); won the Genie award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Gabrielle in the 1987 film I've Heard the Mermaids Singing.
- July 19, 1952 – Jayne Anne Phillips born, American novelist, short story writer and academic; her 1976 short story collection Sweethearts won the Pushcart Prize; 1979’s Black Tickets won the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy; her novels include Machine Dreams, Shelter (American Academy Award in Literature winner) and Quiet Dell.
- July 19, 1970 – Nicola Sturgeon born, Scottish politician; current First Minister of Scotland and Leader of the Scottish National Party, both since 2014; Depute (deputy) First Minister of Scotland (2007-2014); Cabinet Secretary for Infrastructure, Investments and Cities (2012-2014); Cabinet Secretary for Health and Wellbeing (2007-2012); Deputy Leader of the Scottish National Party (2004-2014); Scottish Parliament Member (since 1999); feminist, campaigner for women’s and LGBT rights, and for gender equality. She received both criticism and praise for being the Honorary Grand Marshal of the Glasgow Pride Parade during the July 14-15 2018 weekend instead of meeting with Donald Trump, especially since she mentioned in her speech at the march that she was “a wee bit tickled” by reports that Trump hates her and was “bitching” about her to Theresa May, adding “I suppose I should take it as a compliment. I certainly don’t spend that much time talking about him.” She also praised Blair Wilson, a 21-year-old gay man who was beaten up when he asked people who were shouting abuse at him, “Why?” Wilson posted an account of the attack with a selfie of his bloodied face smiling defiantly on Facebook. Sturgeon praised him for speaking up and said that Wilson showed values that should define the country.
- July 19, 1984 – Geraldine Ferraro, U.S Representative (Democrat-New York), gives her acceptance speech as the first woman to run for Vice President of the United States as a major party candidate, on the Democratic ticket with Walter Mondale (Democrat-Minnesota). "The daughter of an immigrant from Italy has been chosen to run for vice president in the new land my father came to love."
- July 19, 2019 – Representative Ilhan Omar was greeted by a throng of supporters as she arrived home in Minnesota, fresh off attacks from Donald Trump and his supporters that included chants of “send her back” at Trump’s rally. Even as Trump renewed his criticism of Omar, the freshman lawmaker received a strong display of support from constituents in her district who greeted her at the Minneapolis-St Paul airport with chants of “Welcome home llhan.” Meanwhile, Trump was backpedaling on his mild criticism of his supporters from just the day before, now calling them “incredible patriots.”
- July 19, 2020 – Donald Trump tweeted “We are trying to help Portland, not hurt it. Their leadership has, for months, lost control of the anarchists and agitators. They are missing in action. We must protect Federal property, AND OUR PEOPLE.” The response from Oregon officials was unanimous – the federal agents were not asked for, and they should be recalled. Governor Kate Brown said that Trump was guilty of “a blatant abuse of power by the federal government.” Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum filed a lawsuit in federal court against DHS, the Marshals Service, Customs and Border Protection, and the Federal Protection Service, alleging their behavior violated state citizens’ right to peacefully protest as well as their due process rights. Portland mayor Ted Wheeler said, “The president has a complete misunderstanding of cause and effect. We have dozens, if not hundreds of federal troops descending upon our city . . . they are sharply escalating the situation. Their presence is actually leading to more violence and more vandalism. It’s not helping the situation at all. They’re not wanted here. We haven’t asked them here. In fact, we want them to leave.” One of the protesters, activist Olivia Katbi Smith, age 28, said when she and her husband left at midnight, they saw an SUV sitting in an empty parking lot, which seemed odd. When they shone a flashlight into the vehicle, there were four men sitting inside, dressed all in camouflage. “What if four guys in camo jumped out of this car and started chasing us?” she asked. “How do we know they’re federal officers, and not just Proud Boys or fascists just wearing camo? There’s no way for us to know the difference.”
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- July 20, 1591 – Anne Hutchinson baptized (birthdate not noted) in England; American colonial preacher, midwife, and notable figure in American colonial religious freedom. Her father, an Anglican cleric and teacher, gave her a far better education than most girls and even many boys received. She and her husband William became followers of the Puritan John Cotton, who preached simplicity, and doing away with the ceremony and vestments of the Church of England; Cotton and his wife fled England for the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1633. Anne and William Hutchinson with their 11 children followed the Cottons to Boston in 1634. She was greatly in demand as a midwife, and soon began having weekly women’s meetings in her home, commenting on recent sermons. Men started coming to the meetings as well. Then she accused local ministers, other than Cotton and her brother-in-law Reverend John Wheelwright, of preaching a “covenant of works” rather than a “covenant of grace,” and made other accusations against them, leading to increasing tensions between the minority Free Grace adherents and the majority of the colony’s ministers and magistrates. Hutchinson and others, including John Wheelwright, were put on trial. Hutchinson was banished from the colony when she claimed she possessed direct personal revelation from God. She and her remaining supporters founded the settlement of Portsmouth on Narragansett Bay in Providence Plantations (now Rhode Island), founded by Roger Williams, a staunch advocate for religious freedom.
- July 20, 1837 – Queen Victoria succeeds to the throne of the British Empire.
- July 20, 1848 – The second and concluding day of the Woman’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls NY. The only resolution that day which required a great deal of discussion before passing was: “Resolved, That it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.” It took 72 years for American women to finally get the right to vote when the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, although some local voting rights had existed before that (propertied women and free people of color in New Jersey voted from 1793 to 1807, when their right to vote was revoked), and women earned the right to vote in the Wyoming territory in 1869, (Utah also gave women the vote in 1869, but the U.S. Congress disenfranchised Utah women with the Edmunds–Tucker Act in 1887, an attempt to weaken Mormon political control of the state). Colorado followed in 1893, and Idaho in 1896. Suffragists struggled to win voting rights one state or territory at a time, but in 1878, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton split off to form the National Woman Suffrage Association, which began pushing for a U.S. Constitutional amendment to gain voting rights for women.
- July 20, 1854 – Philomène Belliveau born, Canadian artist of Acadian descent. She took courses in painting and drawing in Boston, Massachusetts, then returned to Canada, where her portraits in pastel became very popular.
- July 20, 1882 – Olga Hahn-Neurath born, Austrian mathematician and philosopher; she enrolled as a student for math and philosophy studies at the University of Vienna in 1902. She became blind in 1904, when she was 22. In 1911, she became the third ever female graduate in philosophy at Vienna University. Her doctoral thesis, published at 1911, received great compliments from her instructor, Adolf Stöhr, the successor to the chair of Ludwig Boltzmann. Her main interest in math was in the field of Boolean algebra. In 1912, she married Otto Neurath, a fellow student. Olga became a regular participant in the discussions of the Vienna Circle of Logical Empiricism, a group of philosophers and scientists drawn from the natural and social sciences, logic and mathematics, who met regularly from 1924 to 1936 at the University of Vienna, chaired by Moritz Schlick. Following the defeat of Red Vienna in the Austrian Civil War (February 1934), she fled, through Poland and Denmark to the Netherlands, where she joined her husband. Following an operation three years later, she died on her 55th birthday, in The Hague.
- July 20, 1890 – Julie Vinter Hansen born, Danish astronomer; in 1915, she was the first woman to hold an appointment at the University of Copenhagen, as a ‘computer’ at the University’s observatory, then became an observatory assistant, and in 1922, was promoted to observer. Editor of the Nordisk Astronomisk Tidsskrift (Nordic Astronomy Review), then Director of the International Astronomical Union’s telegram bureau. By 1939, she was the First Astronomer of the University of Copenhagen observatory, well-known for her accurate computation of orbits of minor planets and comets. She was awarded the 1939 Tagea Brandt Rejselegat Award, which enabled her to travel, and the 1940 Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy. In 1956, she was appointed a knight in the Order of the Danneborg.
- July 20, 1919 – Jacquemine Charrott Lodwidge born to a British father and a French mother; English writer on crime and magic, TV and film art director, and bookseller. Her father died when she was nine, so she was raised primarily speaking French. During WWII, she served for two years with the Free French forces among the Bedouins in the Syrian desert. After the war, she studied architectural history and spent several years in Greece, then worked as a researcher for BBC television, and worked her way up to art director; in between film assignments, she started selling books to supplement her income, beginning in a gazebo, and calling the enterprise Pelekas Books. It was described by R. H. Lewis: “There are herons at the bottom of the terraced garden, and a river from which excellent rough fishing can be had; accompanying husbands or wives not interested in books are invited to bring fishing rods. The building has been redesigned with film-set type features such as a spiral staircase and a gazebo, where the books are now housed . . . when Jacquemine is not on location, so strictly by appointment.”
- July 20, 1921 – Congresswoman Alice Mary Robertson (Republican-Oklahoma) becomes the first woman to preside over the U.S. House of Representatives – surprisingly, not a fan of feminists, considering she couldn’t have been a member of Congress without their untiring efforts.
- July 20, 1921 – Simin Behbahani born as Simin Khalili, Iranian icon of contemporary Persian poetry, lyricist and activist, dubbed “the lioness of Iran.” She became a major force in bringing the ghazal, a traditional Persian verse form somewhat like an ode, into modern usage; President of the Iranian Writers Association; honored with awards for both her poetry and her humanitarian and civil rights advocacy.
- July 20, 1927 – Barbara Bergmann born, notable feminist economist whose work covered arrange of issues from childcare to poverty and Social Security, using microsimulations and macrovariables; she argued that discrimination is a pervasive characteristic of labor markets, and against traditional economic methodology as fraught with unrealistic assumptions leading to faulty conclusions. Co-founder and president of the International Association for Feminist Economics, and a trustee of Economists for Peace and Security; honored with the 2004 Carolyn Shaw Bell Award for increasing the status of women in economics and showing how women can advance in the academic field.
- July 20, 1936 – Barbara Mikulski born, American Democratic politician; U.S. Senator from Maryland (1987-2017), former member and longest-serving woman in U.S. House of Representatives (1977-1987). First woman chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee. She served on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and Select Committee on Intelligence, until she announced her retirement in 2017.
- July 20, 1938 – Dame Diana Rigg born, British stage, television and screen actor; former member of the Royal Shakespeare Company; memorable as Mrs. Emma Peele in the British television series The Avengers, and as Olenna Tyrrell in Game of Thrones. When she discovered after making 12 episodes of The Avengers that the cameraman was earning more money than she was, “I made a bit of a stink. At the time, it was considered very bad form.”
- July 20, 1939 – Judy Chicago born, American artist, feminist and author, known for large collaborative art installations; her masterpiece, The Dinner Party, now at the Brooklyn Museum, consists of three ‘wings’ with place settings for remarkable women figures in legend and history.
- July 20, 1942 – First class of Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps (WAAC) at Fort Des Moines, Iowa.
- July 20, 1962 – Julie Bindel born, English writer, extreme radical feminist; co-founder of the law-reform group Justice for Women, which has helped women prosecuted for killing violent male partners; in addition to non-fiction books like The Pimping of Prostitution: Abolishing the Sex Work Myth, she is a regular contributor to The Guardian, New Statesman, and The Sunday Telegraph.
- July 20, 1964 – Terri Irwin born in the U.S., American-Australian naturalist, conservationist, and author; owner of the Australia Zoo in Beerwah, Queensland. Co-starred with her husband, Steve Irwin, in The Crocodile Hunter, from 1997 until his death in 2006.
- July 20, 1971 – Sandra Oh born in Canada, Canadian-American actress; she was the first Asian-heritage woman to host the Golden Globe Awards in 2019, the first actress of Asian descent to be nominated for a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama series in 2018, and the first Asian-heritage woman to win two Golden Globes. She became a U.S. citizen in 2018.
- July 20, 1975 – Birgitta Ohlsson born, Swedish Liberal politician, Swedish Minister for European Union Affairs (2010-2014); Swedish Parliament member (2002-2010); chair of the Federation of Liberal Women (2007-2010); chair of the Liberal Youth of Sweden (1999-2002).
- July 20, 1981 – Viktoria Ladõnskaja born, Estonian Pro Patria party politician; elected to the Riigikogu (parliament) to represent a section of Tallinn, Estonia’s capital, in 2015; previously worked as a journalist and freelance writer.
- July 20, 1989 – Aung San Suu Kyi was put under house arrest by Burma’s ruling junta. She was General Secretary of the National League for Democracy, when it won 81% of the seats in Parliament that year, but the junta refused to hand over power, and nullified the election. She remained under house arrest for almost 15 years before being released November 13, 2010. She became State Councillor of Myanmar (2015-2021) during years when her country’s military was accused of oppression and genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingya people, as well as censorship and arrests of reporters. Ironically, the military which she had publically defended against these charges staged a coup d'état, which overturned the 2020 election results and installed General Min Aung Hlaing as the de facto head of state, while Aung San Suu Kyi was arrested on charges of ‘importing communications equipment without proper paperwork’ and deposed. Her political party was since been dissolved by the junta, and she has been additionally charged with incitement to sedition, corruption, and violating Myanmar’s official secrets act. Her trial began June 14, 2021. Aside from a court appearance, she has been held incommunicado.
- July 20, 2007 – Elena Kagan is approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee, 13-6, as the U.S. Supreme Court’s fourth woman justice.
- July 20, 2020 – At the International Criminal Court, the trail opened of Al Hassan Ag Abdoul Aziz Ag Mohamed Ag Mahmoud, a former Islamic militant in Mali who is accused of orchestrating crimes against humanity, and war crimes. He is also charged with persecution on grounds of gender, the first time that sexual enslavement, forced marriage, and rape have been cited as major components of charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The prosecutor was Fatou Bensouda, who has worked for the ICC since 2012. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which went into force on July 1, 2002, includes sexual trafficking, rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, and enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence as crimes against humanity and war crimes.
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- July 21, 1653 – Sarah Good born, who became one of the first three women accused and executed during the Salem witch trials.
- July 21, 1656 – Elizabeth Key Grinstead wins her lawsuit, gaining freedom from slavery for herself and her baby son, with the argument that her father was an Englishman and she is a baptized Christian. She was the illegitimate daughter of an enslaved black mother and white English planter Thomas Key, who was also a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses. Before moving back to England in 1636, Thomas Key made arrangements for Elizabeth’s godfather, Humphrey Higginson, to have possession of her for nine years. He stipulated that Higginson would be Elizabeth’s guardian, that she would be treated like a member of his family, and that she be given her freedom at the age of fifteen. But Thomas Key died later that year, and Higginson sold her to Colonel John Mottram, for whom she was required to serve another nine years before being released from bondage. Mottram took her to Northumberland County, where he built a plantation, Coan Hall. There Elizabeth remained until 1650, when Colonel Mottram brought over a group of white indentured servants from England, including a young lawyer named William Grinstead. William and Elizabeth fell in love, and had a son together, whom they named John. They were prohibited from marrying while Grinstead was serving his indenture, and Elizabeth Key’s future was uncertain. John Mottram died in 1655, and Elizabeth Key sued for her freedom after the executors of Mottram’s estate classified her and her infant son as Negroes (and part of the property assets of the estate) rather than as an indentured servant with a free-born child. With Grinstead acting as her lawyer, she won her case, but later the Virginia House of Burgesses passed laws that the status of children will follow that of the mother, not the father, abandoning English Common Law, which determines a child’s status based on the father, following instead the Roman partus sequitur ventrem, thus condemning all children born of enslaved women in Virginia to slavery for life. One of her descendants is the actor Johnny Depp.
- July 21, 1856 – Louise Bethune born, the first American woman to work as a professional architect. She opened a firm in Buffalo NY with her husband in 1881. William Fuchs joined the firm in 1890, and it became Bethune, Bethune & Fuchs. She was elected to the Western Association of Architects in 1885, and was the first woman named as an associate of the American Institute of Architects in 1888. In 1891, she refused to participate in a design competition for the Women's Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago because men were paid $10,000 to design buildings for the fair while the women were only paid $1,000. Her best-known project is the Hotel Lafayette, a French Renaissance style building completed in 1926, which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2010.
- July 21, 1858 – Maria Christina of Austria born, Queen consort of Spain until her husband’s death in 1885, shortly before the birth of their son. She became the regent for her son Alfonso XIII, until 1902, when he assumed full powers on his 16th birthday. During her time as regent, the Treaty of Paris (1898), was signed, ending the Spanish-American War.
- July 21, 1896 – Sophie Bledsoe Aberle born, American anthropologist, author, physician and nutritionist who worked with Pueblo people in New Mexico; employed by the Bureau of India Affairs (1935-1944),then for the National Research Council (1944-1949), and for the University of New Mexico (1949-1954); she was a strong advocate for Pueblo land rights in her 1948 book, The Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, Their Land, Economy and Civil Organization, and served on many boards and committees for land allocation and healthcare; she was one of the first two women appointed to the National Science Board by President Truman (1951-1957); Chief Nutritionist at the Bernalillo County Indian Hospital (1955-1966); professor of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico (1967-1970).
- July 21, 1900 – Isadora Bennett born, theatrical and dance publicity agent; Martha Graham was her client from 1939 until 1970, and other clients included José Limón, José Greco, American Ballet Theatre, Royal Danish Ballet, and the Joffrey Ballet; she is credited with bringing much attention to modern dance, helping to establish its popularity with American audiences.
- July 21, 1905 – Diana Trilling born, literary critic and author, compiled her feminist essays in “We Must March My Darlings” (1977).
- July 21, 1938 – Janet Reno born, first woman to serve as U. S. Attorney General (1993 – 2001, under President Clinton), attorney.
- July 21, 1944 – Onyebuchi “Buchi” Emecheta born in Nigeria, British novelist and children’s author; The Bride Price, The Slave Girl (1978 New Statesman Jock Campbell Award winner), and The Joys of Motherhood.
- July 21, 1945 – Wendy Cope born, English poet for both adults and children, and editor; her poetry collections include Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, Anecdotal Evidence, Two Cures for Love, and Family Values. She has also edited several poetry anthologies.
- July 21, 1949 – Christina Hart born, director, producer, playwright, and actress; known for her plays Women Over the Influence and Birds of a Feather.
- July 21, 1950 – Susan Kramer born, Baroness Kramer of Richmond Park; British Liberal Democratic Politician; Liberal Democrat Treasury Spokesman (2017-2019); Minister of State at the Department for Transport (2013-2015); Member of Parliament for Richmond Park (2005-2010).
- July 21, 1957 – Althea Gibson wins the U.S. Open, becoming the first black woman to win a major U.S. tennis title.
- July 21, 1960 – Sirima Babsaranaike takes office as Prime Minister of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), becoming first woman head of government in the modern world.
- July 21, 1966 – Sarah Waters born, Welsh author known for award-winning novels set in the Victorian era, often featuring lesbian protagonists; Tipping the Velvet won a 1999 NY Times Notable Book Award, and the 2000 Lambda Literary Award for Fiction; Fingersmith won the 2002 Crime Writers’ Association Ellis Peters Historical Dagger.
- July 21, 2007 – J.K. Rowling’s concluding book in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, is released.
- July 21, 2016 – Fox News chief Roger Ailes resigned after former anchor Gretchen Carlson filed a lawsuit accusing him of sexual harassment. Ailes led the far-right conservative cable news channel for 20 years, building it from scratch into a money-making ratings juggernaut. He reportedly got a $65 million exit package. Rupert Murdoch, the 85-year-old executive co-chairman of the news channel's parent — 21st Century Fox — took over as acting CEO until a permanent replacement was hired. Suzanne Scott became CEO in May, 2018.
- July 21, 2018 – Authorities were still searching for Mollie Tibbetts, age 20, a University of Iowa student named who disappeared four days earlier while out for an evening jog. Tibbetts was running in Brooklyn, a small town about halfway between Iowa City and Des Moines. Right before her jog, she gave no indication anything was wrong in a call to her boyfriend, who was out of town. "Everything's on the table, unfortunately," said Poweshiek County Sheriff Thomas Kriegel. "We're hoping that she's somewhere with a friend, and she'll show up Monday or Tuesday, and everything will get back to normal." A month later, police identified a suspect seen in surveillance footing which showed his car following Tibbetts on her jog. On August 21, he led police to her body in a Poweshiek County cornfield. After an autopsy revealed the case of death was "multiple sharp force injuries," he was charged with first-degree murder. He was found to be a migrant worker without documentation, who was working for Yarrabee Farms, owned by the family of Craig Lang, a prominent Iowa Republican leader. Donald Trump and other Republicans attempted to politicize the case to increase support for anti-immigration policies, but Mollie Tibbett’s father called using her death for political purposes “heartless” and “despicable.” He said, "The Hispanic community are Iowans. They have the same values as Iowans. As far as I'm concerned, they're Iowans with better food," and denounced those who "appropriate Mollie's soul in advancing views she believed were profoundly racist."
- July 21, 2020 – Statistics were released showing that violence against women in Mexico has surged since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, but Mexican President Andrés López Obrador has downplayed the problem and slashed budgets of the agencies charged with addressing women’s issues. Violent crimes against women, including femicide, have increased by 7.7% in the first half of 2020, compared with the same period in 2019, and women’s shelters reported a sharp rise in women fleeing from domestic violence. But the government approved a 75% budget cut for the federal women’s institute, and López Obrador proposed withdrawing all state funding for women’s shelters operated by NGOs, saying that women fleeing violence could be given a cash payment instead. He had exhibited a Trump-like tone-deafness on women’s issues since he took office, claiming that 90% of calls to the emergency services over domestic violence were “false,” and earlier in July telling reporters: “Mexican women have never been as protected as now.” Meanwhile, calls to 911 emergency services reached record levels in March, 2020, and remained high during the pandemic lockdown. When millions joined the country’s first national women’s strike against gender-based violence in March, López Obrador suggested the organizers were part of a rightwing plot against him. The National Network of Shelters said it has received 80% more calls since the pandemic started, while the number of women and children admitted to its 69 shelters increased 50%. The network’s director, Wendy Figueroa said López Obrador’s declarations “reflect a perpetuation of the impunity that exists in Mexico. What’s also serious is that he’s doubting the word of women in situations of violence.”
- July 21, 2020 – In Turkey, the burned remains of P1nar Gůltekin were found, who had been missing since July 16. She was a 27-year-old student at Muğla University School of Economics. When her mother and sister, who live in Istanbul, were unable to reach her by phone, they came to Muğla and reported her disappearance to authorities, then asked for help through social media. The chief suspect in the case, a married man who managed the bar where she worked part-time, claimed he wanted to rekindle his relationship with Gůltekin, but became angry when she refused. She was beaten into unconsciousness, then strangled. Her body was doused with gasoline and burned, then stuffed into a garbage barrel, and cemented in. News of her murder set off new waves of anti-femicide protests and vigils. In 2019, Turkey’s rate of femicides reached its highest level in ten years: 474 women were murdered, mostly by partners or relatives. Data on deaths is compiled from news reports and victims’ families by by women’s groups like We Will Stop Femicide, which began tracking murders of women after the government admitted it did not keep records. Government statistics related to violence against women that do exist are unreliable and often differ from department to department. “Violence against women is a problem everywhere. In Turkey we have a strong women’s rights movement but we also face a lot of opposition,” said Fidan Ataselim, We Will Stop Femicide’s general secretary. “In the last 20 years society has changed a lot: more women are demanding their right to work and go to university. The more choices we have, the more intense the backlash gets.” Turkey was the first country to adopt a 2011 Council of Europe convention against gender-based violence and domestic violence, a groundbreaking legal framework designed to protect victims and effectively prosecute offenders, known as the Istanbul Convention. Since then, however, even basic rights and protections won by Turkish women have come under threat as President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s conservative Justice and Development party (AKP) has tried to roll back legislation they say threaten “traditional family values.” AKP deputy chair Numan Kurtulmuş said in a televised interview earlier in July that the Istanbul convention was “very wrong” and “played into the hands of LGBT and marginal elements” in Turkish society. Other senior ministers regularly make public statements that are degrading to women. Erdoğan has said that women are not equal to men, and those without children are deficient. “Comments like this from men in power legitimise these attitudes,” said Selin Nakipoğlu, a solicitor specialising in family law. “Our existing laws are actually strong, they’re just not enforced. On top of that, the government is trying to roll back things like child support and introduce mediation in divorce proceedings, even if there was violence in the marriage. An undercover journalist once rang the family consultation bureau and was told to pray and pacify her husband. Despite all of the government’s efforts, divorce rates are still going up. More and more women are rejecting these ideas.” Men who say they acted on impulse, or who claim to be religious and dress smartly in court, are handed reduced sentences so often there is now a term for it: “tie reduction.” In 2020, Turkish women activists recorded 408 femicides, and another 171 women who died under suspicious circumstances.
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- July 22, 1849 – Emma Lazarus born, poet, novelist and translator, wrote “The New Colossus,” (1883), which was later inscribed in base of the Statue of Liberty – “Give me your tired, your poor . . .”
- July 22, 1862 – Dorothea Fairbridge born, South African author, conservationist, and co-founder of the Guild of Loyal Women in 1900, a volunteer organization which identified, marked, and maintained Second Boer War graves and military graveyards. Her writings include novels like That Which Hath Been and The Torch Bearer; histories such as Historic Farms of South Africa; and travel guides.
- July 22, 1881 – Augusta Fox Bronner born, American psychologist, specialist in juvenile psychology; assistant director of the Psychopathic Clinic of the Juvenile Court (1914-1917); beginning in 1917, at the Judge Baker Foundation of Boston, a child guidance clinic attached to Boston juvenile court, Bronner handled most of the psychological examinations, first as assistant director, and from 1930 on as co-director; co-author with William Healy of the influential Manual of Individual Mental Tests and Testing, a comprehensive guide to assessing a patient’s mental state, published in 1927; Bronner and Healy developed a team approach to help psychologists, physicians and social workers coordinate their treatment of patients; Bronner was president of the American Orthopsychiatric Association in 1932.
- July 22, 1886 – Hella Wuolijoki born in Estonia, Finnish politician and writer using the male pen name Juhani Tervapää, best known for her Niskavuori series; served in the Finnish Parliament (1946-1947), and as director of YLE, the Finnish national broadcasting company (1945-1949).
- July 22, 1890 – Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy born, American philanthropist, socialite, and married to Joseph Kennedy Sr., who served as U.S. Ambassador to the UK (1938-1940), and she was the mother of nine children, including John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, and Eunice Kennedy Shriver, founder of the Special Olympics. Rose Kennedy was involved with many charities and women’s civic groups. In her autobiography, Times to Remember, she said she looked on child rearing as “a profession that was fully as interesting and challenging as any honorable profession in the world and one that demanded the best I could bring to it . . .”
- July 22, 1893 – Katharine Lee Bates is inspired to write a poem she originally called “Pikes Peak” after standing at the top of Pikes Peak: “. . . when I saw the view, I felt great joy. All the wonder of America seemed displayed there, with the sea-like expanse.” The poem was put to the music of Samuel A. Ward in 1910, becoming the song “America the Beautiful.”
- July 22, 1898 – Miriam Underhill born, mountaineer and environmentalist, on the first all-women ascent of the Matterhorn in 1932, developed “manless climbing” and all-women climbing groups.
- July 22, 1908 – Amy Vanderbilt, American author and etiquette expert; Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Book of Etiquette.
- July 22, 1909 – Licia Albanese born in Italy, Italian- American lyric soprano, noted for her portrayals of Verdi and Puccini heroines, particularly Madama Butterfly and Violetta in La Traviata. She was a leading artist at the Metropolitan Opera (1940-1966) and at the San Francisco Opera (1941-1961). When she was 78 years old, she appeared in a stage revival of the musical Follies in 1987. Albanese lived to the age of 105, and died in New York City in August, 2014.
- July 22, 1910 – Ruthie Tompson born, American animator; noted for her work on the Walt Disney animated classics Sleeping Beauty, Pinocchio, Dumbo, and Fantasia; one of the first three women to be admitted to the International Photographers Union. Tompson retired from Disney in 1975, after working there for almost 40 years; she turned 111 this year, and is the oldest member of Women in Animation.
- July 22, 1915 – Shaista Suhrawardy Ikramullah born, Pakistani politician, diplomat, and author; first Muslim woman to earn a PhD from the University of London. She was a leader in the Muslim women Student’s Federation and the Women’s Sib-Committee of the All-India Muslim League. She was one of two women representatives at the first Constituent Assembly of Pakistan in 1947, and was a delegate to the United Nations, working on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the Convention Against Genocide (1951). She was Pakistan’s Ambassador to Morocco (1964-1967), and also wrote works in both Urdu and English, including Behind the Veil: Ceremonies, Customs and Colour and her autobiography, From Purdah to Parliament.
- July 22, 1924 – Margaret Whiting born, American pop singer, signed to one of Capitol Records’ first recording contracts.
- July 22, 1936 – Geraldine C. Darden born, American mathematician, the 14th African American woman to earn a PhD in mathematics, from Syracuse University in 1967; co-author of papers on pre-calculus.
- July 22, 1940 – Judith Walzer Leavitt born, American historian, professor of history of medicine, history of science and women’s history; author of books on the history of childbirth in America, and public health in Milwaukee; member of the American Association for the History of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
- July 22, 1954 – Ingrid Daubechies born, Belgian physicist (doctorates in quantum mechanics and theoretical physics) and mathematician; Professor of Mathematics at Duke University since 2011; Professor of Applied Mathematics at Princeton (2004-2011), the first woman to be a full professor of mathematics at Princeton; first woman president of the International Mathematical Union (2011-2014); known for her work on wavelets in image compression, and digital signal processing. The orthogonal Daubechies wavelet is named for her. Among other applications, she used these two fields to unequivocally identify forged Van Goghs; recipient of the 1994 American Mathematical Society Steele Prize for Exposition for her book Ten Lectures on Wavelets, and the 1997 AMS Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize; member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences since 1998, and has received numerous other awards and honors.
- July 22, 1958 – Eve Beglarian born, American composer; winner of the 2017 Alpert Award in the Arts for her body of work. She has collaborated with writer/performer Karen Kandel on a piece about women in Vicksburg from the Civil War to the present.
- July 22, 1967 – Lauren Booth born, English broadcaster, journalist, anti-war activist and supporter of Palestinian rights; she began her writing career in 1997 at the London Evening Standard, writing the column ‘About Town,’ then moved to the New Statesman (1999-2002) and The Mail on Sunday, which sent her to report on the 2005 Palestinian elections; she was a presenter on In Focus at the UK’s Islam Channel (2006-2008), and started Between the Headlines at the Iranian-owned Press TV in 2008; senior producer at Al Jazeera in Doha, Qatar, since 2014.
- July 22, 1973 – Ece Temelkuran born, Turkish journalist and author; columnist for the Istanbul daily newspaper Milliyet (2000-2009) and the Ciner Media Group’s newspaper Habertürk (2009-2012) and as a presenter on CMG’s Habertürk TV (2010-2012), which fired her because of her criticism of the Turkish government, especially after the December 2011 Uludere massacre of local villagers smuggling cigarettes on the Turkish border. She had been called Turkey’s “most read political columnist” and her work has been republished in The Guardian and Le Monde Diplomatique; she has published 12 books, including the non-fiction Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy, and the novels, Muz Sesleri (Banana Sounds) and The Time of Mute Swans; awarded the 2008 Ayşe Zarakolu Freedom of Thought Award by the Human Rights Association of Turkey.
- July 22, 2018 – Michael Cohen, Donald Trump's former attorney, reportedly recorded Trump two months before the 2016 election discussing payments to former Playboy model Karen McDougal to silence her about an alleged affair. Lawyers familiar with the case say the FBI seized the recordings when agents raided Cohen's office earlier in 2018, when Cohen came under investigation for potential campaign finance violations committed while paying hush money to cover up extramarital liaisons. Trump tweeted that it was "inconceivable a lawyer would tape a client - totally unheard of & perhaps illegal. The good news is that your favorite President did nothing wrong!" Agents seized emails, tax records, business records, and other matter related to several topics, including payments made by Cohen to Stormy Daniels, and records related to Trump's Access Hollywood controversy. Recordings of phone conversations Cohen made were also obtained. Cohen pled guilty in August 2018 to charges of campaign finance violations, tax fraud, and bank fraud. Cohen said he violated campaign finance laws at the direction of Trump and "for the principal purpose of influencing" the 2016 presidential election. The New York Times reported on August 22, 2018, that Cohen court documents revealed that two senior Trump Organization executives were also involved in the hush money payments, and that Cohen "coordinated with one or more members of the campaign, including through meetings and phone calls" about the payments. On December 12, 2018, Cohen was sentenced to three years in federal prison and ordered to pay a $50,000 fine after pleading guilty to tax evasion and campaign finance violations. On February 26, 2019, he was officially disbarred by the New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division. He reported to the federal prison near Otisville, New York, on May 6, 2019, but was released early due to COVID-19 concerns on May 21, 2020, under house arrest.
- July 22, 2020 – Women in the UK carried out significantly more daily childcare duties than men during the pandemic lockdown, an average of over three hours a day compared with just two hours a day for men, in households with children aged 18 or younger, according to new figures released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The study, based on two surveys of over 6,000 parents, also found that one in three women with school-aged children said their mental health had suffered as a result of home-schooling, compared with 20% of men. The ONS report stated, “During lockdown women spent a far greater proportion of their time looking after children compared to men, with the difference amounting to over an hour and a quarter a day. Although we found there was a near-equal division of time when it came to activities like home-schooling, and playing or reading with children, the difference came from women spending much more time on activities like feeding, washing, and dressing children.” The study also found that only half of British parents said they felt confident to home-school their children during the coronavirus lockdown. About 52% of parents said their children struggled to continue their education while home-schooling. Women spent over twice as much time on unpaid work than on paid work, while men spent only about a third more time on unpaid work than they did on paid work.
- July 22, 2021 – Alabama Republican Governor Kay Ivey held a press conference, expressing her frustration with the surge of Covid-19 cases in her state, which has the lowest vaccination rate in the U.S. “Folks are supposed to have common sense. But it’s time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks, not the regular folks. It’s the unvaccinated folks that are letting us down,” Ivey told reporters in Birmingham. Asked about plans to issue a mask mandate or other restrictions now that Covid cases are starting to rise again, Ivey responded, “The new cases of Covid are because of unvaccinated folks. Almost 100% of the new hospitalizations are with unvaccinated folks. And the deaths are certainly occurring with unvaccinated folks.” She added, “We’ve got to get folks to take the shot,” calling the vaccine “the greatest weapon we have to fight Covid . . . It’s safe, it’s effective, the data proves that it works, doesn’t cost anything. It saves lives.” In recent days – amid surges largely occurring in states where Donald Trump won in the 2020 election – increasing numbers of Republicans and conservative media figures have called upon Americans to get the vaccine after months of declining to press the issue.
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- July 23, 1721 – Anna Dorothea Therbusch born in Germany, Polish Rococo painter; elected to the Stuttgart Academy of the Arts, the Bologna Academy, the Académie Royale in Paris, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.
- July 23, 1844 – Harriet Williams Russell Strong born, American agriculturist, inventor, and conservation activist; pioneer of innovations in water storage and flood control; music composer; a leader of the West Coast woman suffrage movement; first woman member of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce.
- July 23, 1889 – Anna Akhmatova born, Ukrainian-Russian poet and author; one of the most significant Russian poets of the 20th century.
- July 23, 1892 – Icie Hoobler born, biochemist and physiologist, first woman to head a local section of American Chemical Society and to serve as its national president, Director of the Research Laboratory of the Children’s Fund of Michigan.
- July 23, 1900 – Julia Davis Adams born, American author, social worker, journalist, and playwright, known for historical and biographical novels, young adult books, and dramas; used the pen name F. Draco for the Murray Hill mystery novels.
- July 23, 1900 – Inger Margrethe Boberg born, Danish folklore researcher and author; first woman in Denmark to earn a Doctor of Philosophy, in folkloristics; worked as an archivist at Dansk Folkemindesamling (Danish Folklore Archive) from 1932-1957, but it didn’t become a full-time position until 1952, so she also took on temporary work as a school teacher. Recipient in 1945 of the Tagea Brandt Rejselegat, awarded to Danish women who make significant contributions in the sciences or arts, which enabled her to travel and further her studies; co-editor with Stith Thompson of the Motif-Index of Folk-Literature.
- July 23, 1907 – Elspeth Grant Huxley born, British writer, journalist, broadcaster, magistrate, and environmentalist; author of 30 books, the best known are based on her childhood on a Kenyan coffee farm; The Flame Trees of Thika.
- July 23, 1916 – Laurel Martyn born, Australian ballerina and choreographer; in 1935, she was the first Australian woman to be accepted into the Vic-Wells (later Sadler’s Wells) Ballet, and became a soloist in 1938. After returning to Australia, she performed with the Borovansky Ballet, taught dance, and created her own dance works inspired by Australian themes. She was a co-founder of the Young Dancers’ Theatre, and Classical Dance Teachers Australia.
- July 23, 1917 – Barbara Deming born, influential nonviolent activist, writer, and poet; she marched for peace, civil and women’s rights, lesbian and gay rights. A number of her essays and poems were collected together in We Are All Part of One Another, published in 1984.
- July 23, 1928 – Vera Rubin born, American astronomer; studied with Maria Mitchell at Vassar; she was the only graduate in astronomy from Vassar in 1948, then was barred from enrolling in the graduate program at Princeton, which didn’t allow women until 1975. Rubin got her Master’s at Cornell, and her PhD at Georgetown, in spite of having to battle sexism at almost every step. When the men at the Palomar Observatory told her, ‘It’s a real problem because we don’t have a ladies room,’ she cut a piece of paper into a skirt and stuck it on the male figure on the door to one of the men’s restrooms. She said, ‘Look, now you have a ladies room.’ Rubin did the pioneering work on galaxy rotation rates, uncovering the discrepancy between the predicted angular motion of galaxies and the observed motion, by studying galactic rotation curves, which became known as the galaxy rotation problem, work that was compelling evidence of the existence of dark matter. Rubin’s results were met with great skepticism, but over subsequent decades, they were confirmed. She was a strong advocate and mentor of women in science; honored with numerous awards, including the Bruce Medal, the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, and the National Medal of Science, but was never honored with a Nobel Prize.
- July 23, 1928 – Ruth Whitney born, pioneering editor of Glamour magazine for 31 years (1967 – 1998), among first editors to introduce relevant social topics to a woman’s magazine, and she featured the first African American on the magazine’s cover (1968).
- July 23, 1931 – Te Arikinui (Paramount Chief) Dame Te Atairangikaahu born, Māori queen for 40 years, the longest reign of any Māori monarch; Te Atairangikaahu means ‘hawk of the morning sky’; in 1979, she was the first Māori appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire; Te Atairangikaahu was a strong supporter of Māori cultural events, and a spokesperson on indigenous issues.
- July 23, 1940 – Danielle Collobert born, French author, poet and journalist; she worked at the Galerie Hautefeuille, a major art photography gallery, in Paris in the early 1960s while writing what would become her novel, Meurtre (Murder), and her first published book, Chants des Guerres (War Songs). She became involved in 1962 with the Front de libération nationale (FLN), Algeria’s nationalist movement, and wrote for the Algerian magazine Révolution Africaine until it stopped being published in 1964; joined the Writers’ Union in 1968, and traveled in Czechoslovakia, writing about the Prague Spring and its aftermath; committed suicide on her 38th birthday; her last work, Survie (Survival), was published just three months before her death.
- July 23, 1942 – Sallyanne Atkinson born, Australian Liberal Party politician and journalist; Lord Mayor of Brisbane (1985-1991), the first woman to be elected to the position; worked for the Brisbane Telegraph (1960-1962) and the Courier Mail (1963-1964); Alderman on the Brisbane City Council (1979-1985); since 2017, she has been the Chair of the Museum of Brisbane, and Council President of the Women’s College at the University of Queensland.
- July 25, 1946 – The Women’s Army Corps was such a wartime success that on this day, at the request of the War Department, legislation was introduced in both the House and Senate to continue the women’s corps as a permanent part of the U.S. military. The strongest supporter of women in the military was Representative Edith Nourse Rogers, Republican of Massachusetts. She was sponsoring legislation to permit women to serve their country in uniform even before America was attacked at Pearl Harbor. She said, “The bill to continue the WAC is a recognition of their services. I am delighted that they are going to continue. The legislation should get through easily in view of the record. They paved the way for all other women’s services except the Nurse Corps.” General Eisenhower said: “During the time I had WACs under my command they have met every test and task assigned to them … their contributions in efficiency, skill, spirit and determination are immeasurable.”
- July 23, 1957 – Jo Brand born, English comedian, writer and presenter, former psychiatric nurse, who began her comedy career doing stand-up at alternative comedy clubs in the mid-1980s billed as ‘Sea Monster.’ In 1993, she became a resident panelist on the BBC show, The Brain Drain. In 2010, she was one of the performers in Channel 4’s Comedy Gala, a benefit for the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital. She has written several books, including the novel The More You Ignore Me, which she adapted as a feature-film script. She was the presenter of The Great British Bake Off: An Extra Slice (2014-2017).
- July 23, 1959 – Nancy Savoca born, American film director, producer and screenwriter; noted for True Love (which won the Sundance Film Festival 1989 Grand Jury Prize), If These Walls Could Talk, and The 24-Hour Woman.
- July 23, 1970 – Thea Dorn born, German novelist and playwright; since 2004, also the TV host of Literatur im Foyer, a show featuring interviews with authors and book reviews.
- July 23, 1976 – Judit Polgár born, Hungarian Grandmaster in chess, considered the strongest woman player of all time; achieved the Grandmaster title at 15 years, 4 months, breaking the Youngest Grandmaster record previously held by World Champion Bobby Fischer; she was also the youngest player to break into the FIDE Top 100 players rating list, ranking #55 in the world at the age of 12; in 2005, she became the first, and to date, only woman to qualify for a World Championship Tournament, to surpass a 2700 Elo, reaching a career peak of 2735, and to reach a world ranking of #8; she held the title of #1 ranked woman in the world from 1989 to 2014, when she was briefly overtaken by Chinese player Hou Yifan, but regained her #1 ranking in 2015, shortly after announcing her retirement from competitive chess; the only woman to win a game against a reigning World Champion, also defeated eleven current or former World Champions in at least one game.
- July 23, 1978 – Lauren Groff born, American novelist and short story writer; known for The Monsters of Templeton, Delicate Edible Birds, and Arcadia.
- July 23, 1999 – NASA Colonel Eileen Collins becomes first woman to command a US spacecraft, Space Shuttle mission STS-93. In 1995, she was the first woman to pilot a shuttle.
- July 23, 2001 – Megawati Sukarnoputri becomes first woman president of Indonesia, after President Abdurrahman Wahid is removed from office. She was given day-to-day control of the government beginning in August 2000 and served as President from July 2001 to October 2004, but lost the 2004 election.
- July 23, 2014 – International Women in Engineering Day was launched for the first time in the UK by the Women’s Engineering Society (WES) to celebrate its 95th anniversary. Since that launch the day has grown enormously, and it received UNESCO patronage in 2016.
- July 23, 2018 – Someone in the Fox News booking department mistakenly booked Massachusetts state Senator Barbara L’Italien on Fox & Friends First, instead of former Arizona Representative Ann Kirkpatrick, to talk about Kirkpatrick’s support for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. L’Italien decided to take advantage of the Fox News’ error in contacting her office, and use the opportunity to speak her mind to Donald Trump, who was known to be a regular viewer of Fox & Friends. She didn’t correct their mistake until she introduced herself when she was on the air. “Good morning, I’m actually here to speak directly to Donald Trump. I’m a mother of four, and I believe that separating kids from their parents is illegal and inhumane. I’m actually Barbara L’Italien. I’m a state senator representing a large immigrant community and running for Congress in Massachusetts. We have to stop abducting children and ripping them from their parents’ arms, stop putting kids in cages, and stop making 3-year-olds defend themselves in court.” She rolled right over attempts by the confused hosts to point out that Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy had been stopped, but she was then cut off. Host Rob Schmitt told the audience, “That didn’t go as planned.” L’Italien finished her message on Twitter, “I've always fought for vulnerable people, and in Congress I will use every opportunity I have to make sure powerful people like @realDonaldTrump hear their voices. Here's the full statement I would've given @FoxNews if I hadn't been cut off. Stop hurting Latino children to score political points with your base,” she said. “Please reunite these families before you cause more trauma. I refuse to believe that our only two options are open borders or traumatizing children, and shame on you for pretending that they are.”
- July 23, 2018 – Jess Wade, a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College London’s Blackett Laboratory, adds biographical entries on women in science to Wikipedia every day. “I’ve done about 270 in the past year,” Wade said. “I kind of realized we can only really change things from the inside. Wikipedia is a really great way to engage people in this mission because the more you read about these sensational women, the more you get so motivated and inspired by their personal stories.” It was only as a PhD student that she was struck by how being in a minority can shape day-to-day experiences. “Being isolated is hard – this goes for all underrepresented groups,” she says. “Then there are all those challenges during your PhD that amplify that isolation. If you don’t have anyone you can really get on with around you it’s so, so hard.” WOW2 makes use of Wikipedia, and had undoubtedly featured many of Jess Wade’s contributions.
- July 23, 2020 – Sixty years after the first women were ordained as priests in the Church of Sweden, women are now 50.1% of the church’s priests, but they are paid less than their male colleagues. According to the church newspaper Kyrkans Tidning, the gender wage gap averages 2,200 Swedish kronor (£196 per month, about $250 USD). Cristina Grenholm, the secretary for the Church of Sweden, claimed the gap was due to more men being in senior positions. The Church of Sweden maintains its historic threefold ministry of bishops, priests, and deacons, and has approximately 5,000 ordained clergy in total. There are thirteen dioceses, each headed by a bishop, who is elected by priests, deacons, and some laity within the diocese. In 1982, Swedish legislators scrapped a “conscience clause” allowing members of the clergy to refuse to cooperate with a female colleague. The church separated from the Swedish state in 2000, and is the largest Lutheran denomination in Europe, with over 6 million members, but regular church attendance is down. The first woman bishop wasn’t elected until 1997, and Antje Jacklén became the church’s first woman archbishop in 2013. In 2017, the church urged clergy to use gender-neutral language, saying that God was “beyond our gender determinations.”
- July 23, 2020 – The House Hispanic Caucus called on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy to publicly censure Representative Ted Yoho of Florida for his verbal assault of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York on the steps of the nation’s capitol on July 20, and his denial on July 21, in an “apology” to her on the House floor, that he had called her a “fucking bitch” even though it was said in front of a member of the press. Representative Ocasio-Cortez made her own powerful speech on July 23, “I am someone’s daughter too” – pointing out that verbal abuse and disrespect of women is a daily occurrence in America, and part of a much larger problem than this single incident. Her impassioned speech on the House floor resonated with many women who say such language has been tacitly accepted for far too long. Ellen Gerstein, who worked for years in technology publishing before becoming an executive, said, “I thought, listening to her, ‘Wow, you're 100% right. Why didn’t I apply those same standards to myself?’” Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University said, “This is all part of a shift. Women are feeling empowered to speak up and believe they will be heard.” She attributed the change in large part to the #MeToo movement.
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- July 24, 1868 — Marie Goegg-Pouchoulin founds the Association Internationale des Femmes, the first women’s organization in Switzerland, advocating for women’s rights and peace; she later leads a successful campaign for women’s admission to the University of Geneva in 1872.
- July 24, 1889 – Agnes Meyer Driscoll born, American cryptanalyst, mathematician and physicist, who was fluent in French, German, Latin, Japanese and English; she enlisted in the U.S. Navy during WWI as a chief yeoman (highest rank available to women then) in the Postal Cable and Censorship Office, then was reassigned to the Code and Signal section of the Director of Naval Communications, where she became a leading cryptanalyst, and stayed on as a civilian, except for a two year stint working for the Hebern Electric Code Company on developing an early cipher machine. She returned to the Navy in 1924, where she was an early supporter of machine support for code cracking. Driscoll was a major player in breaking the Japanese Navy manual codes – the Red Book Code in 1926, and the Blue Book Code in 1930; early in 1935, she was a leading member of the team cracking the Japanese M-1 cipher machine used by the Japanese Navy for encrypting messages to their naval attachés in embassies around the world. In 1940, she was doing critical preliminary work on JN-25, the Japanese fleet’s operational code, before she was transferred to a U.S. team working on the German Enigma cipher, but their approach proved fruitless. She was reassigned in 1943 to a team already working on the Japanese Coral cipher; however, the code was broken by others shortly after her arrival. Driscoll was in the U.S. Navy contingent which joined the Armed Forces Security Agency in 1949, and then the National Security Agency in 1952. She retired in 1959.
- July 24, 1892 – Alice Ball born, African American chemist who developed the first successful treatment for Hansen's disease (leprosy). Ball was also the first African American and the first woman to graduate with a MS degree in chemistry from the College of Hawaii (now the University of Hawaii). She died at age 24, and she was not fully credited for her discoveries until decades after her death.
- July 24, 1897 – Amelia Earhart born, American aviator; first woman pilot to fly solo across the American continent (1928) and across the Atlantic (1932); in 1931, became an official of the National Aeronautic Association, promoted the establishment of separate women’s records; member of the Ninety-Nines (named for the number of charter members), a women pilots organization which promoted women in aviation; her plane went missing in the Pacific en route to Howland Island during an attempt to fly around the world in 1937; there have been numerous searches and theories about what happened, but no trace of the plane, Earhart or her navigator Fred Noonan has been found.
- July 24, 1900 – Zelda Fitzgerald born, American author, poet, and socialite; she and her husband F. Scott Fitzgerald became symbols of the Jazz Age in the 1920s. Her only published novel, the semi-autobiographical Save Me the Waltz (1932), was poorly received, but F. Scott Fitzgerald had insisted she make major alternations prior to publication, as much of what she had written overlapped events he was using in his as-yet unfinished novel Tender is the Night. It has since been reevaluated somewhat more favorably. She spent much of her life from the mid-1930s until her death in and out of sanitoriums. In 1948, she was locked in a room awaiting electroshock therapy when a fire engulfed the Highland Hospital’s main building in Asheville NC, killing her and eight other women.
- July 24, 1914 – Frances Oldham Kelsey born in Canada, Canadian-American pharmacologist and physician. She was hired in 1960 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, one of only seven full-time and four part-time physicians reviewing drugs for the FDA. One of her first assignments was to review an application by Richardson Merrell for the drug thalidomide (under the tradename Kevadon) as a tranquilizer and painkiller with specific indications to prescribe the drug to pregnant women for morning sickness. Even though it had already been approved in Canada and over 20 European and African countries, she refused to authorize thalidomide for market, and requested further studies. She resisted pressure from the drug manufacturer to approve the drug, because of an unexplained nervous system side effect in an English study, and she insisted on a full testing of thalidomide. Her concerns proved justified when thalidomide began to be linked to serious birth defects in Europe. Kelsey’s insistence on full testing, backed by her FDA superiors, made headlines and helped to pass the 1962 Kefauver Harris Amendment to strengthen drug regulation, the same year she was honored with the President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service by President John F. Kennedy. She was appointed by the FDA as deputy for scientific and medical affairs in 1995. In 2000, Kelsey was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. She retired from the FDA in 2005, at the age of 90, after 45 years of service. In 2010, Dr. Kelsey was presented by the FDA with the inaugural ‘Dr. Frances O. Kelsey Drug Safety Excellence Award.’
- July 24, 1920 – Bella Abzug born, politician, lawyer, and outspoken feminist; Congresswoman (Democrat -New York, 1971-1977); co-founder in 1971 of the National Women’s Political Caucus, and in 1991, co-founder with Mimi Kleber of the Women’s Environment & Development Organization (WEDO). She was also a notable wearer of hats.
- July 24, 1922 – Madeleine Ferron born, French Canadian author and radio show host; noted for her novels Le chemin des dames (The Way of the Ladies) and Le Grand théâtre (The Grand Theatre).
- July 24, 1927 – Zara Mints born, Russian-Estonian literary scientist, Slavic philologist, and lecturer at the University of Tartu in Estonia. She specialized in the works of Russian lyrical poet Alexander Blok, and Russian literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
- July 24, 1936 – Ruth Buzzi born, American comedian, voice actress and actress, best known as a member of the cast of the comedy-variety show Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In (1968-1973), for which she won a Golden Globe, and her voice work as Frou-Frou in the animated feature film The Aristocats. Buzzi supports numerous children’s charities including Make a Wish Foundation, the Special Olympics and a children’s art summer camp. She is also a supporter and fundraiser for the Utopia Animal Rescue Ranch.
- July 24, 1953 – Claire McCaskill born, American Democratic politician; regarded as a “moderate,” she frequently voted against her party’s positions, but received a 100% favorable rating from Planned Parenthood on healthcare and abortion rights, and an “F” rating from the National Rifle Association; U.S. Senator from Missouri (2007-2019), she was a ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee (2017-2019); served as Auditor of Missouri (1999-2007), Prosecutor of Jackson County (1993-1998), and in the Missouri House of Representatives (1983-1988); political analyst for MSNBC and NBC since 2019, and a visiting fellow at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics.
- July 24, 1960 – Catherine Destivelle born, French mountaineer; first woman to complete a solo ascent of the Eiger’s north face (1992).
- July 24, 1966 – Aminatou Haidar born, Sahrawi (nomadic tribe of Berber-Arab heritage) human rights activist and advocate for the independence of Western Sahara, noted for non-violent protests; president of the Collective of Sahrawi Human Rights Defenders (CODESA); imprisoned by Moroccan authorities in 1987-1991 and 2005-2006. In 2009, she was returning from a trip to the U.S. when her passport was confiscated, and she was expelled by Morocco for refusing to state her nationality as “Moroccan” which a Moroccan official called an “act of treason.” She staged a hunger strike after being forced back to her previous stop, the airport in the Canary Islands. The UN, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International all called on Morocco to allow her to return to her home, resulting in global headlines. After over four weeks, she was near death, and Moroccan authorities finally allowed her return, but she was placed under house arrest, and blocked from speaking to journalists. A month later, she returned to Spain for medical treatment, and was found to still be in poor health. Amnesty International reported that Haidar and her family were under constant surveillance by Moroccan security forces and were being harassed and intimidated. She has continued her non-violent struggle for the rights of the Sharawi people in spite of death threats and even physical attacks on herself and members of her family, Recipient of the 2008 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award, the 2009 Civil Courage Prize, and the 2019 Right Livelihood Award, “for her steadfast nonviolent action, despite imprisonment and torture, in pursuit of justice and self-determination for the people of Western Sahara.”
- July 24, 1968 – Coleen Doran born, American author, illustrator and cartoonist; noted for her artwork used along with work by others in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman graphic novel series, and for her illustrations of his short story “Troll Bridge,” as well as her own space opera series, A Distant Soil.
- July 24, 1969 – Jennifer Lopez born, American singer, actress and producer; the first Latina actress to earn over $1 million USD for a film. She is involved in political activism and philanthropy, including Amnesty International, the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, Boys and Girls Clubs, the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, and the American Red Cross. She endorsed and made appearances for both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton during their presidential campaigns. In 2017, she donated $1 million for humanitarian aid for Puerto Rico, and launched with her husband Somos Una Voz (We Are One Voice) to continue to raise funds for disaster relief to areas affected by Hurricane Maria. She is also a supporter of LGBT rights, and has raised millions of dollars for HIV/AIDS research.
- July 24, 1971 – Patty Jenkins born, American film and television director and screenwriter; noted for directing Monster, for which Charlize Theron won an Oscar for Best Actress, and Wonder Woman (2017). In 2011, she won the Directors Guild of America award for Outstanding Directing in a Dramatic Series for the pilot episode of the television crime drama The Killing. Variety reported in late 2017 that Patty Jenkins closed a deal to direct Wonder Woman 1984, and her paycheck is rumored to be in the $8 million dollar range, which would make her the highest-paid woman director in history. That is still less than half what A-list male directors make. She would also receive a substantial portion of box office grosses as part of her contract. The sequel's 2020 release date has been postponed due to Covid-19.
- July 24, 1973 – Amanda Stretton born, English racing driver, and broadcast journalist; the first woman driver to compete in the ASCAR Mintex Cup, in which she finished in 6th place, and was on the first women’s team in the British GT championships, as well as the first woman to race in the FIA Championships. She was the first British woman to win an international long distance event at Spa-Francorchamps, and competed in the 24 Hours of Les Mans in 2006. She became a presenter on Channel 4’s Motorsport on 4, and went to work for Sky Sports, EuroSport and Silverstone TV.
- July 24, 1987 – Hulda Crooks, 91-years-old, becomes the oldest person to climb Japan’s Mount Fuji.
- July 24, 2018 – Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland and UN High Commissioner, launched a new initiative called Mothers of Invention, to create “a feminist solution for climate change.” It kicked off with a series of podcasts showcasing grassroots climate change activists at the local level, but also global efforts like legal challenges under way to force governments to adhere to the Paris Agreement goals. Scientists and politicians alongside farmers and indigenous community leaders from Europe, the U.S., Australia, India, Kenya, South Africa and Peru are featured.
- July 24, 2020 – As the UK economy contracted, half of working mothers were unable to access the childcare they needed to return to work, according to a survey by the campaign group Pregnant Then Screwed, which exposed the scale of the nation’s childcare crisis. Working mothers were like ‘sacrificial lambs’ – lack of childcare was a factor in over half of cases where women were made redundant (laid off) since the pandemic hit. Between March and June, 2020, the survey gathered detailed responses from nearly 20,000 women, and found that 67% of key workers were forced to reduce their hours because of a lack of access to childcare, 60% struggled with childcare provision, and 45% did not have the childcare in place they needed over the summer. Of the 1,756 pregnant key workers who responded to the survey, 30.5% had been suspended on incorrect terms, such as being told to take sick leave or to start maternity leave early. Caroline Nokes, the Conservative MP who chairs the women and equalities select committee, called the lack of a single reference to childcare in the summer mini-budget ‘shocking.’ She continued, “The specific needs of women are not on anyone’s agenda right now,” she said. “In order to even stand still on gender equality at this moment you would need real drive and ambition, but we are not seeing anyone grasp that.” Tulip Siddiq, Labour’s shadow minister for children and early years, said, “It’s like a throwback to the dark ages. It feels like I’m banging my head against a brick wall. This is not a cabinet that listens to women.”
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