WOW2 is a four-times-a-month sister blog to This Week in the War on Women. This edition covers trailblazing women and events from January 25 through 31.
The next WOW2 edition will post
on Saturday, January 29, 2022.
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 special 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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- January 17, 1562 – In France, Catherine de’ Medici promulgates the Edict of Saint-Germain to recognize the Huguenots, giving limited guarantees of freedom of conscience and private worship, but the Parlement of Paris made remonstrances to the crown concerning conflicts with previous laws, delaying its ratification until after the Massacre of Vassy: on March 1, 1562, 63 Huguenots armed only with stones, were killed and their place of worship burned, beginning the French Wars of Religion.
- January 17, 1814 – Ellen Wood born, English novelist who published as Mrs. Henry Wood; several of her books became international bestsellers, most noted forThe Channings, and East Lynne.
- January 17, 1820 – Anne Brontë born, English author and poet, the youngest of the Brontë sisters; notable for Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
- January 17, 1829 – Catherine Booth born, co-founder of the Salvation Army, with her husband William. As a young woman, she was a supporter of the national Temperance Society. She began her career as a social worker and preacher working with young people, and speaking at children’s meetings. In 1859, she wrote a pamphlet, Female Ministry: Woman’s Right to Preach the Gospel, in defense of American revivalist preacher Mrs. Phoebe Palmer, whose preaching had caused a great stir in England, since only men stood in the pulpits or spoke in meetings at that time. In the pamphlet, she declares that women are neither naturally nor morally inferior to men; that there was no scriptural reason to deny a public ministry to women who felt a calling; and maintained that what the Bible urged, the Holy Spirit had ordained and blessed and so must be justified. Booth also complained that the “unjustifiable application” of Paul's advice, ‘Let your women keep silence in the Churches’ (1 Corinthians 14:34), “has resulted in more loss to the Church, evil to the world, and dishonor to God, than any of [its] errors.” She was a partner in her husband’s work, but also helped alcoholics make a new start, held cottage meetings for converts, and initiated her own campaigns, including lobbying Queen Victoria to seek legislation for safeguarding females, in the form of the "Parliamentary Bill for the protection of girls." She became an eloquent speaker, and a fine writer, proof positive of her contention that women had the right to preach the Gospel on the same terms as men. But in spite of her exhortations that women should be equal, male officers in the Salvation Army received a third more pay than women officers until just before WWII.
- January 17, 1853 – Alva Belmont born, known as Alva Vanderbilt during her first marriage (1875-1896); American multi-millionaire and influential figure in the U.S. women’s suffrage movement. After hearing a lecture in 1908 by Ida Husted Harper, she took up the cause of woman suffrage. In 1909, she founded the Political Equality League to get votes for suffrage-supporting New York State politicians, wrote articles for newspapers, gave strong support to the 1909 New York shirtwaist makers strike (the “Uprising of the 20,000”), paying the bail of the picketers who were arrested. She also joined the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) that year, and donated large sums of money to the suffrage movement in both the U.S. and the UK. Belmont later formed her own Political Equality League (PEL) to seek broad support for suffrage in neighborhoods throughout New York City, and, as its president, led its division of New York City's 1912 Women's Votes Parade. Envisioning a more united movement for the vote, she encouraged the formation of a Black women’s branch of the PEL, but also contributed to the Southern Woman Suffrage Conference, which refused to admit women of color. In 1916, she was one of the founders of the National Woman's Party and was a main organizer of the first picketing ever to take place before the White House, in January 1917. She was elected president of the National Woman's Party, an office she held until her death. She purchased the house which became the NSU’s Washington DC headquarters, which is now the Belmont–Paul Women's Equality National Monument, named for Alva Belmont and Alice Paul. She moved to France after the 19th Amendment was ratified, to be near her daughter Consuelo. After suffering a stroke in 1932, she died in Paris of bronchial and heart ailments at age 80 in 1933.
- January 17, 1877 – May Gibbs born in England, Anglo-Australian children’s author, illustrator, and cartoonist; her family moved to Australia when she was four; she studied art in England; noted for her “gumnut babies” and the book Snugglepot and Cuddlepie; while in England, she drew cartoons for the Common Cause, published by the Suffragettes.
- January 17, 1877 – Marie Zdeňka Baborová-Čiháková born, the first Czech woman botanist and zoologist.
- January 17, 1905 – Peggy Gilbert born, American Dixieland jazz saxophonist and bandleader; beginning in 1928, she appeared in movies and toured in vaudeville shows; in 1933, she founded an all-girl jazz band, which used several different names, including "Peggy Gilbert and Her Metro Goldwyn Orchestra" and "Peggy Gilbert and her Symphonics." The band often played in famous Hollywood nightclubs, including the Cocoanut Grove. She also toured in USO shows, and was an advocate for women musicians. Gilbert had several lean years after WWII, but found a new audience in the 1950s on radio and television. In 1974, at age 69, she started her last great all-female band, “The Dixie Belles,” with musicians from vaudeville and the Big Band era. The group performed on TV and at jazz festivals, and in the 1980 Rose Parade in Pasadena, California. In 1985, the band recorded “Peggy Gilbert & the Dixie Belles.” Gilbert lived to the age of 102.
- January 17, 1910 – Edith Green born, elected to Congress (Democrat-Oregon) in 1954 and served 9 terms; worked on women’s rights, education, and equal pay. Instrumental in passing 1972 Equal Opportunity in Education Act (aka Title IX).
- January 17, 1920 – Nora Kaye born, prima ballerina, choreographer, and film producer; associated with the American Ballet company; collaborated on films with husband Herbert Ross, and served as producer on The Turning Point (1977) and Pennies from Heaven (1981).
- January 17, 1922 – Betty White born, American actress, TV personality, animal rights activist, and national treasure. Her television career is considered the longest in entertainment history, spanning over 80 years. She was also one of the first women to have control both in front of and behind the camera, and is recognized as the first woman producer of a TV situation comedy series, Life with Elizabeth (1953-1955). She also produced and hosted The Betty White Show (1952-1954), a daytime talk and variety show. Several stations in the Jim Crow South threatened to boycott the show because tap dancer Arthur Duncan was a series regular, the first African American to be a regular on a talk show. White refused to fire him, "I'm sorry, but, you know, he stays. Live with it." The show had some trouble attracting sponsors, was shuffled into different time slots, and then quietly canceled. On the last day of 2021, Betty White died at age 99, just weeks before her 100th birthday.
- January 17, 1924 – Jewel Plummer Cobb born, American biologist, cancer researcher, professor, dean. and academic administrator; great-granddaughter of a freed slave, she earned a B.A. in biology in 1945, but had to fight for a fellowship for graduate study in biology; worked on finding a cure for melanoma as an independent researcher at Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory; advocate for women and students of color being admitted to universities and graduate school.
- January 17, 1927 – Moira Shearer born, internationally renowned Scots-English ballet dancer; noted for her performance in the classic ballet film, The Red Shoes.
- January 17, 1927 – Eartha Kitt born, American multi-talented performer, peace and civil rights activist, founder of a non-profit to help disadvantaged youths in Los Angeles; her career in the U.S. took a nosedive in 1968, after Ladybird Johnson asked her about the Vietnam War and she made frank anti-war statements before the press; she was falsely branded as a “sadistic nymphomaniac” and other slanders in a CIA dossier (discovered in 1975) and blacklisted; she left the U.S to make a living in Europe and Asia; when she stepped in as a replacement in London’s West End production of the musical Follies, she stopped the show singing “I’m Still Here.” Kitt made a triumphal return to the U.S starring on Broadway in Timbuktu! in 1978.
- January 17, 1933 – Shari Lewis born as Phyllis Hurwitz, American ventriloquist, puppeteer, and pioneer in children’s television, best known as the original puppeteer of Lamb Chop. She and Lamb Chop made their debut appearance on Captain Kangaroo in 1956, and continued until the PBS program Lamb Chop’s Play Along ended in 1997. Lewis and her husband Jeremy Tarcher then created The Charlie Horse Music Pizza show (1998-1999), which was designed to teach elementary school children about music at a time when one-third of elementary schools were cutting music classes from their curriculum. The program was canceled when Lewis died at age 65, from pneumonia while undergoing chemotherapy in August, 1998.
- January 17, 1935 – Ruth Ann Minner born, American Democratic politician and businesswoman; first woman governor of Delaware (2001-2009), after serving as Lieutenant Governor (1993-2001); also served in the Delaware General Assembly (1975-1982).
- January 17, 1939 – Martha Cotera born, pioneering Chicana feminist, author of 2 seminal texts — Diosa y Hembra and Chicana Feminist, founding member of TEAMS (Texans for Educational Advancement for Mexican Americans), a network of educators that mobilized support for students who participated in the high school walkouts organized by MAYO, the Mexican American Youth Organization. Founded Information Systems Development, a consulting firm in Austin, Texas, and was publisher of the Austin Hispanic Directory. Also a founding member of Texas Raza Unida Party (1969), taught courses which prepared teachers for bilingual education programs.
- January 17, 1942 – Ita Buttrose born, Australian journalist and author; founding editor of Cleo (1972-1975), magazine and editor of Australian Women’s Weekly (1975-1978); first woman editor of a major Australian newspaper, the Daily Telegraph (1981-1984).
- January 17, 1944 – Ann R. Oakley born, distinguished English sociologist, author, and feminist; Founder-Director of the Social Science Research Unit at the Institute of Education, University of London; has published numerous academic works, but also several best-selling novels under the pen name Rosamund Clay, including The Men’s Room.
- January 17, 1945 – Anne Cutler born, Australian Research Professor at the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University and Emeritus Director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen; noted for Native Listening, about human listeners' recognition of spoken language, and in particular on how the brain's processes of decoding speech are shaped by language-specific listening experience; honored with the 1999 Spinoza Prize of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research.
- January 17, 1949 – Anita Borg born, American computer scientist; pioneer in email communication; founder of Systers (1987), the first email network for women, as well as the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (1994), and the Institute for Women and Technology (1997). Honored with the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award from the Association for Women in Computing for her work on behalf of women in the computing field in 1995.
- January 17, 1955 – Katalin Karikó born, Hungarian biochemist who specializes in RNA-mediated mechanisms. Her research has been the development of in vitro-transcribed mRNA for protein therapies. She co-founded and was CEO of RNARx (2006-2013). Since 2013, she has been associated with BioNTech RNA Pharmaceuticals, first as a vice president, then promoted to senior vice president in 2019. Karikó's research includes the RNA-mediated immune activation, resulting in the co-discovery with American immunologist Drew Weissman of the nucleoside modifications that suppress the immunogenicity of RNA, a further contribution to the therapeutic use of mRNA. Together with Weissman, she holds U.S. patents for the application of non-immunogenic, nucleoside-modified RNA. This technology has been licensed by BioNTech and Moderna to develop their protein replacement technologies and was also used for their COVID-19 vaccines. Karikó and Weissman have received many awards including the prestigious Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, TIME Magazine's Hero of the Year 2021, and the 2022 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.
- January 17, 1957 – Ann Nocenti born, American comic book editor for Marvel Comics, journalist, writer, and filmmaker; outspoken commentator on sexism, racism, nuclear proliferation, and other societal issues.
- January 17, 1964 – Michelle Obama born, American lawyer and university administrator, first African-American First Lady (2009-2017). She was assistant commissioner of planning and development in Chicago’s City Hall before becoming the founding executive director of the Chicago chapter of Public Allies, an AmeriCorps program that prepares young people for public service. In 1996, she joined the University of Chicago as associate dean of student services, where she developed the university’s first community service program. In 2002, she went to work for the University of Chicago Medical Center, where in 2005 she became the vice president of community and external affairs. Her memoir, Becoming, had sold over 14 million copies worldwide by November 2020.
- January 17, 1968 – Rowan Pelling born, British journalist, broadcaster, writer, stand-up comedian, ‘editrice’ of the Erotic Review, and columnist for Independent on Sunday and Daily Mail.
- January 17, 1971 – Sylvie Testud born, French actress, writer, and film director; she made her directing debut with the 1998 short film, Je veux descendre (I Want to Get Off), and directed the 2012 feature film, La Vie d'une autre (Another Woman’s Life).
- January 17, 1990 – Blues singer Ma Rainey was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as an ‘Early Influencer,’ and Carole King was inducted for her contributions as a songwriter (King was inducted as a solo artist in 2021).
- January 17, 1992 – During a visit to South Korea, Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa apologises for Japan forcing Korean women into sexual slavery as “comfort women” for Imperial Japanese troops occupying Korea during WWII.
- January 17, 1997 – An Irish court grants the first divorce in the Catholic country since it gained its independence from Britain in 1922.
- January 17, 2020 – China is trying to reverse its long-standing One Child policy, but Beijing just reported its lowest birthrate since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Author of One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment, Mei Fong said, “The whole policy was drafted by missile scientists. It was based around mechanical systems, where you set a target then adjust accordingly. Women’s bodies were treated like engines, you set inputs and expect to get a certain output,” she said. Only child daughters have grown up being taught that limiting family size was a path to happiness, prosperity, and social mobility, but they work in a society where women are penalised for their gender even before their first day on the job. Pregnancy and motherhood bring another level of discrimination for many. That combination of deeply sexist constraints and years of propaganda have proven powerfully effective as contraceptives for many women. Adding to the problem is that the government wants more babies, but only the ones that it considers the right kind of babies, born into a traditional marriage of a man and a woman. Same-sex marriages are illegal, and single mothers face fines or obstacles to accessing social services for their children. One woman has been suing just for the right to freeze her eggs. In the name of “ethnic equality,” the government also recently reduced the number of children ethnic minority couples are allowed, which used to be higher than for the majority Han population. “Urban educated working women are the ones who are going to suffer the most, they are the ones seen as the ideal birth vehicles for China’s future, the handmaidens,” said Fong. “They face all kinds of pressure from families, from society, to reproduce.”
- January 17, 2021 – Two women judges working for the Afghan supreme court were assassinated in Kabul. Violence has surged across Afghanistan, in spite of the peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government. Afghan officials blamed the wave of violence on the release of 5,000 Taliban fighters last year, following a peace deal between the group and the Trump administration. In return, the Taliban pledged not to attack international forces. In recent months, however, suspected Taliban militants have targeted and killed several prominent Afghans including politicians, journalists, activists, doctors, and prosecutors. The murdered women have not been named. Gunmen riding a motorcycle ambushed the women in the early morning in the Taimani area of Kabul as they were being driven to work in a court vehicle. After firing several shots, the gunmen sped off. A crowd gathered at the scene, where shattered glass and a trail of blood lay on the road. “Unfortunately, we have lost two women judges in today’s attack. Their driver is wounded,” said Ahmad Fahim Qaweem, a spokesperson for the supreme court. He added that there were over 200 female judges working for the country’s top court.
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- January 18, 1659 – Damaris Cudworth Masham born, English philosopher, advocate for women’s education; overcame poor eyesight and lack of formal education; highly regarded among eminent thinkers of her time, especially her long-time friend, philosopher John Locke.
- January 18,1884 – Elena Arizmendi Mejia born, Mexican feminist who founded Mujeres de la raza, and co-founded the International League of Iberian and Latin American Women; in 1911, during the Mexican Revolution, she started La Blanca Neutral (the Neutral White Cross) after the Red Cross refused to treated wounded and sick revolutionaries, she raised the money to set up a field hospital in Ciudad Juárez; in spite of the devastation of the city and the overwhelming number of wounded and typhus patients, La Blanca Neutral continued to expand, La Blanca volunteers racing to Iguala in June 1911 to help victims of a massive earthquake; by the end of 1911, there were 25 brigades established across Mexico; she left the organization in 1913, after some male doctors rebelled, refusing to take orders from a woman, which split La Blanca Neutral into opposing factions.
- January 18,1886 – Clara Nordström born, Swedish writer in the German language and translator. She used Nordström, her maiden name, as her penname. She published her first novel, Tomtelilla, in both Sweden and Germany in 1944. She suffered from ill health throughout her life, but completed 16 books before her death in 1962 at age 76.
- January 18, 1941 – Denise Bombardier born, French Canadian journalist, novelist, essayist, and producer; she began her career as a research assistant on the Radio-Canada program, Aujourd’hui (Today), and became a host for Trait-d’union (Hyphen, 1987-1988), and Aujourd’hui dimanche (Today Sunday, 1988–1991). She was the first woman in Quebec to host a public affairs program on television, the weekly Noir sur blanc (Black on White).
- January 18, 1943 – Kay Grainger born, U.S. Congresswoman (Republican-Texas) 1997 to the present; formerly mayor of Fort Worth TX (1991-1995); though a conservative who consistently votes to define marriage as only permitted between a man and a woman, and received a 10% rating from NARAL, in 2016 she was one of the Republicans who opposed GOP Presidential nominee Donald Trump; strong advocate for restricting the Pentagon from entering into new contracts with Russia’s state arms broker, Rosoboronexport.
- January 18, 1962 – Allison Arngrim born, American actress and author; best known for playing Nellie Oleson on the TV series Little House on the Prairie (1974-1981). In 2004, she went public on Larry King Live an incest survivor. In 2010, she published her autobiography, Confessions of a Prairie Bitch: How I Survived Nellie Oleson and Learned to Love Being Hated. She also wrote and performed a one-woman show based on the book. Since the death from AIDS of Steve Tracy, who played her husband on Little House, Arngrim has been an active supporter of ACT UP (the Aids Coalition to Unleash Power) and the AIDS Hotline. She is also frequent speaker and lobbyist for PROTECT, which is dedicated to the protection of children from abuse, exploitation, and neglect.
- January 18, 1971 – Amy Barger born, American astronomer who worked on the Morphs collaboration studying the formation and morphologies of distant galaxies, making discoveries about quasars, black holes, and other far distant objects; recipient of the 2001 Annie J. Cannon Award in Astronomy; elected in 2017 as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
- January 18, 2016 – A woman, known only as Andrea, began legal action against the Metropolitan Police, saying she suffered “abusive, cold-hearted, psychological torture” because a married undercover police officer started a two-year relationship with her using an elaborate fabricated persona, and asked her to marry him, even though he was already married with a child. After several months of being engaged, he faked a mental breakdown, called off the wedding, and disappeared. All of this was so he could infiltrate her circle of friends who were trade unionists and socialists involved in a non-violent campaign against racism. Several offices were engaged in undercover operations to keep several left-leaning groups under surveillance, even though no members of the groups had engaged in any violent activities. Eveline Lubbers, of the Undercover Research Group, a network of activists who carried out a detailed investigation to expose “Carlo Neri” as the officer who moved in with Andrea called himself, said publication of the list “would allow those who have been spied on to discover what had happened to them. It would help more women to find out if their one-time boyfriends were undercover officers.” The relationships the undercover officers initiated with women will be among the issues that a public inquiry into undercover policing – led by Lord Justice Pitchford – will examine. Paul Heron, a lawyer representing anti-racism campaigners, said disclosure of officers’ names would enable those affected to take part in the inquiry.
- January 18, 2018 – The Trump administration announced it would expand protections for medical professionals who object to performing such procedures as abortions and gender reassignment, or dispensing contraceptives, due to religious objections. The new rules will let them stick to their objections without penalty. Civil rights, gay rights, and abortion rights groups, as well as some medical groups, criticized the move, saying the Trump administration was trying to legitimize discrimination. The Department of Health and Human Services will create an oversight entity called the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division to oversee matters concerning the "conscience rights" of doctors, nurses, and other health-care workers. In November, 2019, U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer ruled that the Department of Health and Humans Services (HHS) revised rule overstepped its authority. The three widespread standards of when it is permissible for doctors to refuse care are: when they are subjected to abusive treatment by a patient not in a life-threatening crisis: when the treatment requested is outside the doctor’s scope of practice: or when providing the requested treatment would violate a physician’s duty, such as the Hippocratic mandate to “first do no harm.”
- January 18, 2018 – New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced that she is expecting her first child in June. Ardern will be the second elected world leader to give birth while in office. Benazir Bhutto had a daughter in 1990 while she was serving as Pakistan's prime minister. Ardern, age 37, said she would take six weeks of maternity leave, and that Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters would take over in her absence, but she would be "contactable and available" if members of her center-left coalition government need her input. Her partner, Clarke Gayford, will be a stay-at-home dad and primary care-giver. "Knowing that so many parents juggle the care of their new babies, we consider ourselves to be very lucky," she said. When two mosques in Christchurch came under terrorist attack in March, 2019, she showed extraordinary compassion and resolve in dealing with the crisis, and pushed through stricter gun control laws within days after the attack.
- January 18, 2019 – Canadian Emily Spanton, the daughter of a high-ranking officer in the Toronto police force, accepted an invitation by two French police officers she met in a bar in Paris to see their headquarters at 36 Quai des Orfèvres, which has been home to the Paris police since 1913, and was immortalized by Georges Simenon in his celebrated Maigret detective series. For real-life police, “36” is the top rung of the career ladder. Spanton says she was drunk and shaky on her feet, “I knew I wasn’t in a state to find my hotel. And I thought that going to a police station would sober me up as there would be plenty of lights and people.” But after she went upstairs to the fifth floor and entered room 461, Spanton said she walked into “the worst night of my life.” What she says happened in the early hours of April 23, 2014, is at the center of an ongoing court case in the assize court in Paris’s imposing Palais de Justice. Her testimony has left France shocked. She told the three judges and nine members of the jury she was gang-raped by at least two men. As she tried to leave, she says, she was dragged into another office and raped again. In the dock are two members of the Brigade de Recherches et d’Intervention (BRI), an elite unit specialising in tracking down gang members and terrorists. French law prevents the names of the police officers being given, but they deny the charges, claiming Spanton consented to sex. L’Express magazine suggested the case had “poisoned” the Paris police force for almost five years and nearly signed the death warrant of the BRI. Spanton’s legal team had to battle to have the officers brought to trial after investigating judges decided there was no case to answer, citing “inconsistencies” in her testimony. Spanton’s lawyer said the judges had travelled to Canada to interview her friends and family and “dig around” in her personal life, but had not done the same for the accused. After the Paris public prosecutor stepped in, this decision was overturned on appeal. Police colleagues had suggested that because Spanton had allegedly been flirting and kissed the two officers during the evening, they believed she was happy to go further. “Their mistake was to have let the truth come out bit by bit because they were afraid of the consequences on their families and their careers,” one police officer told L’Express. “This has led to questions about their credibility.” Spanton said she remembered being raped by up to three men, but said she could not identify the third. She told the jury her glasses were taken from her and she was unable to see clearly. “I just gave up; just wanted it to be over … I kept my eyes closed.” She was, she insists, in “no fit state to consent” to anything. She says when she left the building 90 minutes later, barefoot and without her tights, she told the guards at the door she had been raped and they told her to “go home.” DNA from both the accused was found on Spanton’s underwear. Her DNA, mixed with his sperm, was found on the underwear of one of the accused. No match was found for the DNA of a third man. The two accused wiped all messages and videos from the night off their mobiles, but one message found on a colleague’s phone read: “She likes an orgy, hurry up.” After reading a medical report of Spanton’s injuries, the presiding judge, Stephane Duchemin, asked Spanton what she expected from the court. “I just want to stand up and publicly confront these men. Then I want to move on, close this chapter.”
- January 18, 2021 – Hundreds of mourners in Ireland turned out for the funeral Mass of Ashling Murphy, a 23-year-old elementary school teacher whose slaying has reignited debate about how to tackle violence against women. Police announced they had arrested a man on suspicion of murder in the case of Murphy, a musician and teacher whose body was found on the banks of a canal near the town of Tullamore in central Ireland on January 12th. Media reports suggested that Murphy was targeted when she was out jogging in the afternoon. Irish Premier Micheal Martin and President Michael Higgins were among the huge crowds who gathered for the funeral in the small village of Mountbolus.
- January 18, 2021 – The Center for American Progress reported that a record 2,276 women, including 552 women of color, began serving as state legislators. They represent 30% of state legislators nationwide. Nevada continues to be the only state where women represent 50% or more of the state’s legislators.
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- January 19, 399 – Pulcheria born, Regent of the Byzantine Empire during the minority of her brother Theodosius II; beginning in 414, when she was 15 years old, she was proclaimed “Augusta” (Empress) and took the reins of government until 416, when her brother came to power.
- January 19, 1876 – Thit Jensen born as Maria Jensen, Danish novelist and outspoken feminist; founder in 1924 of Foreningen for Seksuel Oplysning (Organization for Sexual Awareness) for which birth control proponent Dr. Jonathan Leunbach performed abortions. She was personally against abortion, but felt that women needed to have a choice.
- January 19, 1889 – Sophie Taeuber-Arp born, Swiss painter and sculptor, one of the most important 20th century geometric abstraction artists.
- January 19, 1893 – Magda Tagliaferro born, Brazilian pianist, soloist-guest artist with major orchestras, taught at the Conservatoire de Paris.
- January 19, 1905 – Oveta Culp Hobby born, second woman in U.S. Cabinet (20 years after Frances Perkins), first Secretary of Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (1953), awarded the Distinguished Medal of Service for her work as the first Director of Women’s Army Corps (1945).
- January 19, 1905 – Anne Hummert born, producer of popular radio programs, leading creator of daytime radio serials (soap operas) during the 1930s and 1940s, “Just Plain Bill” (1933-55), “Ma Perkins,” and “Stella Dallas” (1937-1955).
- January 19, 1921 – Patricia Highsmith born, American author of psychological thrillers; her first novel was Strangers on a Train.
- January 19, 1925 – Nina Bawden born, English novelist and children’s author; winner of the 1976 Guardian’s Children’s Fiction Prize for The Peppermint Pig, and the 1993 Phoenix Award for Carrie’s War; 2004 Golden PEN Award for “a Lifetime’s Distinguished Service to Literature.”
- January 19, 1940 – Mary Burton born in Argentina, anti-apartheid activist; after moving to South Africa in 1961, Burton was appalled by the injustice of apartheid, and joined the Black Sash, a white women’s movement against apartheid which organized demonstrations, marches, and vigils, wearing black sashes and silently holding signs standing outside public buildings in major South African cities. They also opened legal advice centers, and offered legal aid to victims of apartheid. Burton served as national president of the Black Sash (1985-1990). She is the author of The Black Sash. The organization remains active, still providing free legal aid and paralegal support for cases involving discrimination or human rights abuses in South Africa.
- January 19, 1946 – Dolly Parton born, singer/songwriter, “Nine to Five,” and the founder in 1995 of Dolly Parton's Imagination Library, an early childhood literacy program which has since provided over 172,000,000 books to children in the U.S., Canada, Ireland, Australia, and the UK. Over 1600 local community programs bring the Imagination Library to over 1,000,000 children every month.
- January 19, 1948 – Nancy Lynch born, American computer scientist and Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of Software Science and Engineering, and head of MIT’s Theory of Distributed Systems research group; Association for Computer Machinery Fellow; recipient of the 2001 and 2007 Dijkstra Prize, and the 2010 IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award; member of the National Academy of Sciences.
- January 19, 1953 – Almost 72% of all television sets in the United States are tuned into I Love Lucy to watch Lucy give birth, a first on U.S. Television.
- January 19, 1954 – Cynthia Sherman born, American photographer known for conceptual portraits, frequently with herself as the model.
- January 19, 1954 – Esther Shkalim born in Iran, Israeli researcher, curator of Jewish art, and Mizrahi feminist poet. Her family immigrated to Israel in 1958, when she was four years old. She lived in the United States for four years while her husband was working in St. Louis, and she completed her MA at Washington University there. In 1953, Shkalim was the founding manager of the Center for Jewish Heritage at the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv, and also worked as a Jewish art guide for the Ministry of Education. Her book Sharkia (Fierce Eastern Wind) is included in the mandatory literature curriculum of Israeli schools.
- January 19, 1956 – Susan Solomon born, American atmospheric chemist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration until 2011, when she joined the faculty of MIT as the Ellen Swallow Richards Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry & Climate Science; she and her colleagues were the first to propose that the chlorofluorocarbon free radical reaction mechanism is the cause of the Antarctic ozone hole; National Academy of Science member; also serves on the Science and Security Board for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; winner of the National Medal of Science in 1999, and the 2017 Arthur L. Day Prize and Lectureship by the National Academy of Sciences, for substantive work in atmospheric chemistry and climate change.
- January 19, 1959 – Danese Cooper born, American computer scientist and programmer, advocate of open source software; managed teams at Symantec and Apple; chief open source proponent at Sun Microsystems, then senior director of open source strategies at Intel; board member of the Open Source Hardware Association; in 2014, she joined the PayPal company as their first Head of Open Source.
- January 19, 1964 – Janine Antoni born, Bahamian contemporary artist working with photography and sculpture.
- January 19, 1966 – Yukiko Duke born, Swedish journalist, editor, and translator; editor for the literature paper Vi laser since 2011; noted for her translations of Japanese books into Swedish; co-author with her mother of Mikaku, den japanska kokboken (Mikaku, the Japanese Cookbook).
- January 19, 1969 – Edwidge Danticat born, Haitian-American novelist and short story writer; her short story “Between the Pool and the Gardenias” won a Pushcart Prize, her novel The Farming of Bones won the 1999 American Book Award; and Brother, I’m Dying won the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award.
- January 19, 1982 – Jodie Sweetin born, American actress best known for playing Stephanie Tanner on the TV series Full House (1987-1995), and its Netflix sequel Fuller House (2016-2020). She wrote openly about her struggles with substance abuse in her memoir unSweetined, and has been sober since December 2008. Sweetin has since worked as a drug and alcohol counselor, and is an advocate for recovery assistance. She was also active with Refuse Fascism, a project started by RevComs (Revolutionary Communist Party) to demand the removal of the Trump administration through nonviolent protests.
- January 19, 2010 – Republican Scott Brown captured the U.S. Senate seat held by liberal champion Edward Kennedy for nearly half a century, defeating Democrat Martha Coakley in a special election. In 2012, Democrat Elizabeth Warren defeated Scott Brown.
- January 19, 2014 – Bernice King, Martin Luther King's daughter, urged people around the world to honor the slain civil rights leader's memory and mark his 85th birthday by making Monday a "no shots fired" day. She said in an era of frighteningly frequent school shootings and increasingly violent films and video games make the federal holiday honoring her father an important time to renew his legacy. "Dr. King's philosophy of non-violence is more relevant, I believe, than it was 10 years ago," she said.
- January 19, 2018 – Donald Trump became the first sitting president to address the annual March for Life in Washington. He spoke to a small group of activists in the White House Rose Garden, and the address was broadcast live to the larger crowd assembled on the National Mall. "As you all know, Roe v. Wade has resulted in some of the most permissive abortion laws anywhere in the world," Trump said of the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision on abortion. He described the march as "a movement born out of love" and touted his executive actions on the issue.
- January 19, 2020 – The Royal Spanish Academy, Spain’s conservative language academy which has the final word on the correct use of Spanish, had been sitting on a report commissioned over a year ago by Deputy Prime Minister Carmen Calvo concerning a proposal to rewrite the nation’s 1978 constitution using gender-neutral language. It’s been a tumultuous 12 months in Spanish politics, with two general elections and months of political maneuvering before a government could be formed, but now that Pedro Sánchez’s leftwing coalition has been sworn in, the linguistic battle with the venerable academy is heating up. The academy’s report calls the proposed changes “grammatically unacceptable.” Carmen Calvo counters, “It’s time the constitution had a language that respects both genders. It only has masculine language and this isn’t appropriate in a modern democracy.” One solution hit upon by supporters of inclusive language is to “double up” on genders but that infuriates traditionalists, and would mean replacing about 500 words, with considerable doubling up – for example, ‘Spanish citizens’ is traditionally written as ciudadanos españolas, but would become ciudadanos/ciudadanas españoles/españolas. In May, 2021, Spain’s Congress of Deputies rejected a landmark legislative proposal that would have allowed legal gender recognition based on self-determination, eliminating the requirement for medical or psychological evidence to modify one’s legal gender identity, and allowing non-binary and blank gender markers on identity markers.
- January 19, 2021 – Evie Swire was 9 years old when she first heard of Mary Anning, 19th century English fossil hunter in Lyme Regis, and a pioneer in the field of palaeontology, whose finds were often credited at the time to the male collectors to whom she sold her fossils. Anning’s disappointment and frustration was evident in a letter in which she wrote: “The world has used me so unkindly, I fear it has made me suspicious of everyone.” She died at age 47, and was nearly forgotten until H.A. Forde published his biography of Anning in 1925. When Swire found out there was no statue of Anning, she started the “Mary Anning Rocks” campaign with her mother, Anya Pearson, to raise the money to commission one. Swire is now 13, and in spite of setbacks caused by the coronavirus pandemic, she has raised £70,000 (about $95,119 USD). Patrons of the campaign include Sir David Attenborough, the academic and broadcaster Professor Alice Roberts, and the novelist Tracy Chevalier. Actress Kate Winslet, who starred in Ammonite, a film about Anning, also pledged support. The sculptor Denise Dutton, whose recent works include the Land Girls monument at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire, and the suffragette Annie Kenney in Oldham, has been commissioned. Swire and Dutton are hoping to unveil the statue in Lyme Regis in 2022 on May 21, Mary Anning’s birthday.
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- January 20, 1840 – Anne Jemima Clough born, British suffragist and promoter of higher education for women; one of the founders in 1867 of the North of England Council for Promoting the Higher Education of Women, and served as its president (1873-1874); Clough was the first principal of Newnham College, when it was founded in 1871, which is the second women’s college at Cambridge (Girton College was the first, founded in 1869).
- January 20, 1856 – Harriot Stanton Blatch born, American author, suffragist and women’s rights activist, daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
- January 20, 1872 – Julia Morgan born, architect/engineer; first woman admitted to the architecture program at l’École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris; first woman architect licensed in California; innovator in earthquake-resistance in structures; architect of 700+ buildings, including Hearst Castle; she became the first woman awarded the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal in 2014 — 57 years after her death!
- January 20, 1878 – Ruth St. Denis born, American modern dance pioneer; co-founder of the Denishawn School of Dance; she was the teacher and mentor of Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, and other notable American dancers.
- January 20, 1899 – Clarice Cliff born, notable English ceramic artist and modeller who founded the Bizarre line at the A.J. Wilkinson factory (Royal Staffordshire Pottery), then became the Art Director at the adjoining factories of Newport Pottery and A.J. Wilkinson.
- January 20, 1900 – Dorothy Annan born in Brazil to British parents, English painter, potter, and muralist; noted for the Fleet Building telecom murals, nine ceramic tile murals, commissioned in 1960, which were granted Grade II listed status in 2011 by the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), frustrating the plans of building’s current owner, Goldman Sachs, to redevelop the site, destroying the murals in the process.
- January 20, 1908 – Fleur Cowles born, American writer, editor, columnist, and artist; associate editor of Look magazine (1947-1955), founder and creative force behind the short-lived but influential Flair magazine (1950-1951).
- January 20, 1910 – Joy Adamson born in Austria-Hungary, Kenyan naturalist, artist, conservationist, and author; best known for her book Born Free: the story of Elsa, the first lioness raised in captivity to be successfully released back into the wild. Also noted for her water-colour paintings of indigenous plants during her early years in Kenya, when she collected many botanical specimens. Her records include information concerning local uses of plant parts in ritual and medicinal practices, and for insecticides, dyes, fibres, and food. Early in 1956, a completely new period in her life began with the arrival of an orphan lioness cub. Her work with Elsa, and with a cheetah and a leopard, proved that by skilful and considered action wild animals raised up by man can be taught to manage in nature independently. In 1980, Adamson was killed at age 69, in Northern Kenya by a servant during a wage dispute.
- January 20, 1922 – Yvonne Baseden born, daughter of A WWI British pilot and the daughter of the Comte de Vibraye, who met when his plane crashed at the Comte’s estate. As a girl, Yvonne was educated in schools in England, France, Poland, Italy, and Spain, so in addition to native fluency in French and English, she also had a working knowledge of Polish, Italian, and Spanish. Her family moved to London in 1937, and in 1939, she took a job as a bilingual shorthand-typist at an engineering firm. In 1940, she joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) as a General Duties Clerk, was commissioned in 1941, then promoted to Section Officer in the Royal Air Force intelligence branch, assisting in interrogation of captured airmen and submarine crews. This work brought her to the attention of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), and she was recruited in 1943. At age 22, she was one of the youngest SOE women to be dropped by parachute into France, in March of 1944, in the South West region. She traveled from there into Eastern France, and worked for four months in Jura as a wireless operator for the “Scholar” network. Her cover story was that she was "Mademoiselle Yvonne Bernier," a shorthand typist and secretary. Following the largest daylight air drop of the war to that date, during a routine search by the Gestapo on 26 June 1944, she was trapped in a cheese factory with seven colleagues from the network. Her organiser took a suicide pill immediately, as he was known to the Gestapo. Baseden was found, arrested, and taken away for local questioning. At the end of that month, she was moved to the Gestapo Headquarters in Dijon and kept in solitary confinement. In August 1944, she was transferred to a prison in Saarbrücken and then to Ravensbrück concentration camp in September, where she became ill. She was nursed in the camp hospital by Mary Lindell, an English nurse who had worked with the local French resistance, and other prisoners. She was one of about 500 women released from Ravensbrück to the Swedish Red Cross in the closing days of the war. All the women were driven in coaches, the "White Buses", across Germany and Denmark and then on to Sweden. In Malmö, they were cleaned and deloused. Baseden slept on a mattress on the floor of the Malmö Museum of Prehistory, under the skeletons of dinosaurs. She was then flown to Scotland and put on a train to Euston. There was no one to meet her train, so she called the Air Ministry, and they arranged transport to her home in South London. Basenden was awarded the MBE by Britain and the Legion of Honour; the Resistance Medal and the Croix de Guerre avec Palme by France.
- January 20, 1927 – Qurratulain Hyder born, Indian Urdu-language novelist, short story writer, and journalist; one of the most outstanding and influential names in Urdu literature, she is best known for her historical novel, Aag Ka Darya (River of Fire), published in Urdu in 1959, then translated by the author into English and published in 1998. She was honored with the Padma Bhushan, India’s third-highest civilian award. in 2005. She died at age 80 of a protracted lung disease in 2007.
- January 20, 1942 – Linda Moulton Howe born, American investigative journalist, documentary filmmaker, and UFO conspiracy theorist; her early work on environmental issues won the 1982 Florence Sabin Award “for outstanding contribution to public health.”
- January 20, 1944 – Pat Parker born as Patricia Cooks, African American lesbian feminist poet and activist. She wrote poetry about her tough childhood, sexual assault, her older sister’s murder, and an abusive relationship which ended with her being pushed down a flight of stairs, causing her to miscarry. She later came out as a lesbian, and became a political activist with the Black Panther Party, Black Woman’s Revolutionary Council, and was a founder of the Women’s Press Collective. Noted for her powerful poem Womanslaughter, about the murder of her sister Shirley, shot and killed by her husband. He was convicted of manslaughter, but only served a one-year sentence in a work-release program.
- January 20, 1948 – Nancy Kress born, American Science Fiction author; Beggars in Spain won both Hugo and Nebula awards; After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall and Yesterday’s Kin both won Nebula Awards.
- January 20, 1954 – Alison Seabeck born, British Labour politician; Member of Parliament for Plymouth Moor View (2005-2015); member of the feminist Fawcett Society and the Labour Women’s Network.
- January 20, 1956 – Maria Larsson born, Swedish politician; Christian Democrat MP (1998-2014); deputy party leader (2013-2014); Governor of Örebo County since 2015.
- January 20, 1959 – Tami Hoag born, American novelist, best known for her Kovac & Liska murder mystery/thriller series.
- January 20, 1973 – Mathilde d’Acoz born, Queen Mathilde of Belgium, the nation’s first Belgium-born queen. She is noted for her involvement in overcoming child poverty, promoting literacy, and improving the position of women in society. She is the honorary president of UNICEF Belgium; the World Health Organization’s Special Representative for Immunization; and works with Breast International Group, which supports breast cancer research. The Queen Mathilde Fund promotes the care of vulnerable people, and awards an annual prize for good works. She is also the honorary president of Child Focus, a foundation for prevention and investigation of missing and sexually exploited children. Queen Mathilde was named a UN Sustainable Development Goal Advocate in 2016.
- January 20, 1982 – Ruchi Sanghvi born, Indian computer engineer, was the first woman engineer hired by Facebook in 2005, but left the company in late 2010 to co-found the start-up Cove, which was acquired by Dropbox in 2012; she is a founder of the 501-c(4) lobbying group FWD.us, formed to promote immigration reform, improve STEM education, and facilitate technological breakthroughs in the U.S.
- January 20, 2001 – Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, first elected woman Vice-President of the Philippines, becomes its second woman President after Corazón Aquino, when President Joseph Estrada is ousted in a nonviolent 4-day revolution.
- January 20, 2020 – After the passage of a new citizenship law that many believed openly discriminates against Muslims and undermines the secular foundations of India’s constitution, unrest engulfed India in December which showed no sign of abating. Millions continued to take to the streets against the Citizenship Amendment Act, and the government’s attempts to quash the protests, with bans on gatherings of more than four people and increasing police violence and torture, only fuelled the fire of discontent across India. 90-year-old Asma Khatun chanted exuberantly. “Azadi,” the Hindi word for freedom in Shaheen Bagh, a neighbourhood in South Delhi that became a nationwide symbol of resistance. For over 40 days, the frail but feisty 90-year-old camped out on the streets day and night, side by side with hundreds of other women and braving Delhi’s coldest temperatures in over a century. “I am old, my bones hurt in the cold and my children are very worried about my health, but I am sitting here because I will not stand by as Mr Modi tries to break up India, to tell me that this is not my home after 90 years,” said Khatun. Another housewife involved with politics for the first time, Nusrat Asra, age 43, said, “I am not afraid of anything, I am not afraid of the police, I am not afraid of being beaten, I am here just to stand up for freedom.” Her face lit with defiance, Asra added, “We are not fighting for any god or any political party, we are fighting for our rights. And I have brought my 12-year-old daughter here every day to teach her to stand up and fight for her rights too.” The loudest voices of dissent have been women. From activists and lawyers to students, housewives, and grandmothers, both Hindu and Muslim, women across India were at the forefront of the resistance to the new citizenship law, and a nationwide citizenship test, known as the NRC, which could result in millions of Muslims being declared illegal aliens in their own country. For many, it was the first time they had any political engagement at all. Numbers continued to swell, drawing in a cross-generational, largely female crowd unlike any protest seen in India before. Karuna Nundy, one of India’s most prominent lawyers, and a vocal opponent of the act, said, “Being a woman in India feeds into the experience of, and resistance to oppression. We know exclusion, and we know it viscerally.”
- January 20, 2021 – Kamala Harris is sworn as the first woman Vice President of the United States.
- January 20, 2022 – The Smithsonian Institution appointed Cynthia Chavez Lamar as the director of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., which has one of the largest collections of Native and Indigenous items in the world. She is the first Native American woman to serve as a Smithsonian museum director. Chavez Lamar had been the museum's acting associate director for collections and operations. "Together, we will leverage the museum's reputation to support shared initiatives with partners in the U.S. and around the world to amplify Indigenous knowledge and perspectives all in the interest of further informing the American public and international audiences of the beauty, tenacity and richness of Indigenous cultures, arts and histories," she said. Chavez Lamar is an enrolled member at San Felipe Pueblo, and her maternal ancestry includes Hopi, Tewa, and Navajo.
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- January 21, 1610 – Elizabeth Fones Winthrop Feake Hallett born, early Massachusetts Bay Colony settler; The Winthrop Woman by Anya Seton is an historical novel of her life, and her “scandalous” third marriage without knowing for certain that her second husband, who had abandoned the family and disappeared, was dead; she was also one of the few women of the time to own property in her own name. She began life as a Puritan, but died a Quaker.
- January 21, 1675 – Sibylle, Duchess of Saxe-Lauenburg born, Margravine consort of Baden-Baden. Her husband, Louis William, died in 1707 when her son Louis George was only five years old, so she became Regent until he reached his majority in 1727. As Regent, she held a tight rein on the state finances, which had been ravaged by a series of wars with the French, and oversaw or encouraged restoration of many buildings. She also orchestrated the marriage of her daughter Johanna to Louis d'Orléans, Duke of Orléans in 1724. She retired to Ettlingen Palace in 1727. She died in 1733 at age 58.
- January 21, 1714 – Anna Morandi Manzolini born, Italian anatomist and sculptor, lecturer in anatomy at the University of Bologna, known for anatomical wax models.
- January 21, 1804 – Eliza R. Snow born, American Mormon poet and hymnist, plural wife of Brigham Young; General President of the Second Relief Society of the LDS in Utah, a women’s auxiliary for relief of the poor.
- January 21, 1840 – Sophia Jex-Blake born, English physician, teacher, and feminist advocate for women’s education, noted for her 1869 essay, Medicine as a profession for women, in which she reasoned that there was no objective proof of women’s intellectual inferiority to men, and that the matter could easily be tested by granting women “a fair field and no favour” – teaching them as men were taught and subjecting them to exactly the same examinations. Jex-Blake was the first woman to apply to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh. The majority of the Medical Faculty voted in favour of allowing her to study medicine, but the University Court rejected her application on the grounds that the University could not make special arrangements ‘in the interest of one lady.’ Wolfe then advertised in The Scotsman and other Scottish newspapers for other women to join her, and reapplied with four others for the right to matriculate, including attending all the classes and taking all the examinations required to earn a degree in medicine. They were joined by two others, and became known as the Edinburgh Seven, accepted to begin classes in 1869 as Edinburgh became the first British university to accept women. The women quickly showed they could compete on equal terms with the male students, and faced increasing hostility from them. In November 1870, as the women arrived for an anatomy exam at Surgeon’s Hall, a large angry mob threw mud, rubbish, and insults at them. A few influential members of the Medical faculty used this incident to persuade the University to deny them graduation. Jex-Blake and some of the others completed their studies and took exams at European universities which already allowed women graduates. Jex-Blake passed exams at the University of Berne and was awarded an MD in January 1877, then qualified as Licentiate of the King’s and Queen’s College of Physicians in Dublin, and was finally registered with the UK General Medical Council. She was the third woman doctor registered in the UK, and the first practicing woman doctor in Scotland. She founded the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women in 1886. Her determined efforts were the driving force behind Parliament passing legislation in which women won the right to access to medical education.
- January 21, 1845 – Harriet Backer born, Norwegian painter and a fin de siecle pioneer in advancing art as a career for women, both in Norway and in the rest of Europe. She founded an art school (1889-1912) in Sandvika, near Christiania. Backer produced around 180 works of art, notable for her detailed interior scenes, and is regarded as a naturalist and early Impressionist. She was honored in 1908 with Kongens fortjenstmedalje i gull (King’s Medal of Merit in Gold).
- January 21, 1871 – Olga Preobrajenska born, prima ballerina of the Russian Imperial Ballet. She became a prominent ballet teacher (1921-1960) in Paris after the Russian Revolution, who taught Alexandra Danilova and Tamara Toumanova, among many others. Preobrajenska died in 1962 in Paris at age 91.
- January 21, 1895 – Itō Noe born (the family name comes first in Japanese), anarchist-socialist, social critic, author, and feminist. She joined Seitō-sha (Bluestocking Society), and became editor of Seitō, the society’s magazine (1914-1916), where she published stories and articles featuring abortion, prostitution, free love, and women escaping from arranged marriages, causing several issues to be banned by the government censors. Seitō ceased publication due to lack of funds after the government stopped distributors from carrying the magazine in February 1916. She was very critical of the Japanese Kotutai (which refers not only to the system of government but also the national identity, essence, and character). Most Japanese deferred to the state and accepted the emperor as a god who must be obeyed unconditionally. She was constantly harassed by the police as a trouble-maker. In the chaos after the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, Noe, her lover Ōsugi, and his 6-year-old nephew were arrested and killed, either by a squad of military police, or strangled in their cells. The killing of two high-profile anarchists, and such a young child, caused a national outcry. It was called the Amakasu Incident, named for Lieutenant Masahiko Amakasu, who was found responsible for the extrajudicial murders, court-martialed, and sentenced to ten years in prison. But when Hirohito became Emperor of Japan three years later, Amakasu was released.
- January 21, 1905 – Agnes Mongan born, art historian, published works on artists despite restrictions. She was "Keeper of Drawings" (1937-1947) because women were not allowed to be curators until 1947, when she became one of the first U.S. women curators. She became director at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum (1969-1971), making her the first woman director of a major U.S art museum. She mentored many female scholars in the field.
- January 21, 1916 – Denise Bloch born to a Jewish family in France. When her father and two older brothers, all serving as French soldiers, were taken prisoner by the German army in 1940, she, with her mother and remaining brother, survived by using false identities and papers. In 1942, they were smuggled out of occupied France to Lyon in unoccupied Vichy France. Denise Bloch made contact with a Jewish engineer who was working with the French Resistance and the SOE “Ventriloquist” network. She was recruited by the SOE, and worked with an SOE radio operator before he was arrested in October 1942. Bloch went into hiding until she was put in touch Ventriloquist’s leader Philippe de Vomécourt, and began working in the southern French department of Lot-et-Garonne, but was soon sent out, on foot over the Pyrenees to Gibraltar, and from there to London. She was trained as a wireless operator, and parachuted into central France in March, 1944, with fellow agent Robert Benoist. In June, they were both arrested, and she was interrogated under torture before being sent to prison in Germany. She suffered from exposure and malnutrition, and before being sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she was executed by the Nazis with two other SOE women agents sometime in January or February 1945, and their bodies sent to the crematorium. Bloch was 29 years old. The Germans surrendered in May, 1945.
- January 21, 1923 – Judith Merril born, American-Canadian short story writer, novelist, science fiction anthology editor, and peace activist; co-founder in 1947 of the Hydra Club, a social organization for science fiction writers – Lester del Rey, Frederik Pohl, Damon Knight, L. Sprague de Camp, and Theodore Sturgeon were all members; Merril was inducted posthumously into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2013.
- January 21, 1925 – Eva Ibbotson born in Austria, British novelist, children’s and young adult author; her historical novel Journey to the River Sea won the Smarties Book Prize for ages 9-11; Ibbotson’s The Secret of Platform 13 may have been the inspiration for “Platform 9 ¾” in the Harry Potter books.
- January 21, 1941 – Elaine Showalter born, American writer, literary critic, and pioneer in feminist literary criticism in U.S. academia; Teaching Literature and Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage.
- January 21, 1943 – Dame Rosemary Butler born, Welsh Labour Member of the National Assembly for Wales (1999-2016), Presiding Officer of the Welsh National Assembly (2011-2016).
- January 21, 1946 – Gretel Ehrlich born, American poet and essayist, noted for works on nature; Islands, The Universe, Home; The Solace of Open Spaces; This Cold Heaven; in 1991, she was struck by lighting and incapacitated for some time, but later wrote about the experience in A Match to the Heart (1994).
- January 21, 1950 – Agnes van Ardenne born, Dutch politician and diplomat; Secretary General of the UNICEF National Committee of the Netherlands before entering politics; member of House of Representatives (1994-2002); Minister of Development Cooperation (2002-2007), focusing on bilateral development cooperation in Africa; went to Pakistan after the 2005 Kashmir earthquake to survey emergency aid operations; increased the Netherlands’ support for children’s education in the world’s poorest countries.
- January 21, 1956 – Geena Davis born, American actress, producer, and activist. She won an Academy Award in 1989 for Best Supporting Actress for The Accidental Tourist, and was honored with the 2019 Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for her decades of fighting gender bias on and off screen in Hollywood, and received the Lucy Award from Women in Film in 2006. She made her onscreen acting debut in Tootsie, and is also known for her performances in Thelma & Louise, A League of Their Own, and the TV series Commander in Chief and Grey’s Anatomy. In 2004, she launched the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, which works collaboratively with the entertainment industry to dramatically increase the presence of female characters in media, and has sponsored the Bentonville Film Festival since 2015. She is a supporter of the Women’s Sports Foundation, and an advocate for Title IX. In 2004, Davis sponsored the largest research project on gender bias in children’s entertainment, which revealed a three-to-one ratio of male characters to females in children’s movies. In 2005, she teamed up with the nonprofit Dads and Daughters to advocate for balancing the number of male and female characters in children’s television and movies. Davis was the executive producer on the 2018 documentary This Changes Everything, which examined sexism in Hollywood.
- January 21, 1962 – Isabelle Nanty born, French theatre director, actress, and screenwriter; she made her film directing debut in 1993 with The Seagull, based on the play by Anton Chekhov, and has since directed over a dozen films.
- January 21, 1987 – Aretha Franklin becomes the first woman inducted into the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame.
- January 21, 2013 – Myrlie Evers-Williams becomes first woman and first layperson to deliver the invocation, at Barack Obama’s second inauguration.
- January 21, 2017 – The Women’s March, originally planned as “The Women’s March on Washington,” quickly became a worldwide protest against Donald Trump’s political positions and derogatory remarks, in over 400 U.S. cities and 160+ countries worldwide. Marchers also called for legislation and policies regarding human rights, women’s rights, but also immigration reform, healthcare reform, reproductive rights, the natural environment, LGBTQ rights, racial equality, freedom of religion, and workers’ rights. It was the largest single-day protest in U.S. history, with almost 1 million participants in Washington DC, over 5 million total in the U.S., and an estimated total of over 7 million worldwide.
- January 21, 2018 – In London, thousands of women turned out for the global Women’s March (Theme: #Time’s Up) in spite of sleet and heavy rain, a year after the original Women’s March closed down central London. Helen Pankhurst, great-granddaughter of Emmeline Pankhurst, was one of the speakers, along with Labour MP Stella Creasy, who said, “A year ago, everyone told us this was a flash in the pan. They said women will march and then they’ll go home and nothing will change. That’s the point. Everything has to change because #MeToo isn’t just some hashtag, it’s saying we’re not going to cope any more, we’re going to change the rules.” There were hundreds of other Women’s Marches around the world, some taking place on January 20, but most of the marches were on January 21, with hundreds of thousands of women participating. In the U.S. alone, over 380 marches took place in every state.
- January 21, 2020 – Planned Parenthood Action Fund endorsed the Democrat challenging Senator Susan Collins (Republican-Maine) in her closely watched reelection race. Planned Parenthood’s endorsement of Sara Gideon, Speaker of Maine’s House of Representatives, was seen as a possible setback for Collins, who is one of the few Republicans in Congress who supports abortion rights. Collins had been supported by Planned Parenthood in the past. But the organization said Collins “abandoned” women with her vote last year to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was accused of sexual misconduct. Collins was re-elected by a margin of 70,422 votes over Gideon. However, this was a much closer race than 2014, when Collins won by a margin of 222,558 votes over her opponent, former Maine state senator Shenna Bellows, who was sworn in on January 4, 2021, as Maine’s first woman Secretary of State.
- January 21, 2021 – Faith Spotted Eagle, founder of Brave Heart Society and a member of the Ihanktonwan Dakota nation, applauded President Joe Biden for fulfilling a campaign promise he made to rescind the Keystone XL pipeline permit issued to TC Energy (TransCanada) by Donald Trump. Biden’s executive order to cancel the project was issued on his first day in office. “The victory ending the KXL pipeline is an act of courage and restorative justice by the Biden administration. It gives tribes and Mother Earth a serious message of hope for future generations as we face the threat of climate change. It aligns Indigenous environmental knowledge with presidential priorities that benefit everyone,” she said.
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- January 22, 1792 – Lady Lucy Whitmore born as Lucy Elizabeth Bridgeman, English hymn writer, noted for “Father, again in Jesus’ name we meet” published in 1824 in Family prayers for every day in the week.
- January 22, 1797 – Maria Leopoldina of Austria born; she became Empress consort of Brazil when she married Pedro I of Brazil, in exile from Portugal because of the Napoleonic French invasion in 1807. She was intelligent and well-educated, with an interest in botany and mineralogy. Conditions in the Brazilian court were difficult because of the tropical rainfall, heat, and high humidity, but Leopoldina liked the Brazilian people, and espoused their calls for independence from Portugal. When the rest of the court returned to Portugal in 1821, Pedro and Leopoldina remained behind as regents. She briefly took over the reins of government in Rio de Janeiro when Pedro went to São Paulo in August 1822 to prevent an outbreak of civil war, as Brazil moved toward independence. When Leopoldina learned that Portugal was preparing action against Brazil, she met with the Council of Ministers as acting regent in her husband’s absence, and signed Brazil’s decree of independence from Portugal.
- January 22, 1858 – Beatrice Webb born, Baroness Passfield, English economist, sociologist, sociologist, social reformer, and labour historian; co-founder of the London School of Economics and Political Science; played a crucial role in the founding of the Fabian Society; and coined the term “collective bargaining.” She was a pioneer in social research and policy-making, who began as a research assistant to Charles Booth in his pioneering survey of the Victorian slums of London, which was published in the massive 17-volume Life and Labour of the People of London. In her 1891 book The Cooperative Movement in Great Britain, based on her experiences in Lancashire, she distinguished between "co-operative federalism" and "co-operative individualism". She identified herself as a co-operative federalist, a school of thought which advocates consumer co-operative wholesale societies. Health problems led Webb to become a vegetarian in 1902. By 1908, she was a vice-president of the National Food Reform Association. Beatrice Webb was a member of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress (1905-1909). She the lead author of the dissenting minority report, which envisioned “a national minimum of civilised life ... open to all alike, of both sexes and all classes, by which we meant sufficient nourishment and training when young, a living wage when able-bodied, treatment when sick, and modest but secure livelihood when disabled or aged.”
- January 22, 1867 – Gisela Januszewska born, Austrian Jewish physician; first woman doctor to practice in Banja Luka, Bosnia, and one of the few physicians who treated Bosnian Muslim women, heading an outpatient clinic for them. She received highest decorations for her WWI medical corps service; after the war, she moved to Graz, where she treated the poor for free, and was the second Austrian physician awarded the title Medizinalrat, for outstanding contributions to medicine; given the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit, Austria’s highest honor, in 1937; but when the Nazis invaded Austria, her Graz apartment was confiscated in 1940, forcing her to move to Vienna. From there, she was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where she died in 1943.
- January 22, 1887 – Helen Hoyt born, American poet and associate editor of Poetry magazine (1913-1936); she edited several poetry anthologies, including The Second Book of Modern Verse.
- January 22, 1897 – Rosa Ponselle born, American operatic soprano who debuted opposite Enrico Caruso at the Metropolitan Opera in 1918, and performed at the Met until 1937, when her contract was not renewed after disagreements with management over the roles she wanted to play. Ponselle let her singing career lapse, but became a guiding force and vocal coach of the newly formed Baltimore Civic Opera in the 1950s, where she coached several singers early in their careers, including Beverly Sills and Plácido Domingo.
- January 22, 1908 – Katie Mulcahey lit up a cigarette on the street in New York City, and was arrested. Unbeknownst to her, there was a new city ordinance which had been passed just the day before, proposed by City Alderman “Little Tim” Sullivan, to ban women from smoking in public establishments. Sullivan felt that a woman smoking was unseemly and immoral. The ordinance was passed unanimously by the all-male board. The ban didn’t technically prevent women from smoking on the street, but it was enforced as if did. “I never heard of this new law, and I don’t want to hear about it,” Mulcahey told the judge. “No man shall dictate to me.” She was fined $5, but she served time in jail instead, since over half of the working women in the city earned a wage of less than $8 a week. She was the only woman ever cited for violating the ordinance, which she actually had not violated because she was smoking on the street, not in a restaurant or club. After two weeks of fiery letters to the editor, both pro and con, and bickering in the social clubs, it was vetoed by New York City’s mayor, who said he knew of no provision of law that gave the Board of Aldermen the power to enact such an ordinance.
- January 22, 1920 – Philippa Pearce born, English author of children’s books; 1958 Carnegie Medal for Tom’s Midnight Garden.
- January 22, 1961 – Wilma Rudolph sets a new world indoor record in the women’s 60-yard dash, running it in 6.9 seconds.
- January 22, 1965 – Diane Lane born, American Actress, Academy Award nominee; noted for her active involvement with Heifer International and Actors for Peace and Justice, and her participation in the documentary Half the Sky, based on the book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.
- January 22, 1973 – The U.S. Supreme Court delivers its decisions in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, voting 7-2 to legalize elective abortion in all 50 states.
- January 22, 1992 –Dr. Roberta Bondar, aboard NASA Space Shuttle Discovery, becomes Canada’s first woman and first neur0logist in space.
- January 22, 1997 – The U.S. Senate confirms Madeleine Albright as the first woman U.S. Secretary of State. She served as Secretary of State under President Bill Clinton from 1997 until 2001.
- January 22, 2014 – President Obama promised to launch a campaign against sexual assault on college campuses. He said an "inspiring wave of student-led activism" had exposed the crisis — an estimated one in five women are raped while in college, most of them by men they know. Obama signed a presidential memorandum establishing a task force to recommend policy changes within 90 days.
- January 22, 2016 – The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, in response to the outcry over the lack of minorities represented in the Oscar nominations, announced that it will be doubling the number of women and minority members of the academy by 2020. "The Academy is going to lead and not wait for the industry to catch up," Academy President Cheryl Boone Isaacs said in a statement. 2016 was the second year in a row that only white actors were nominated in all four acting categories.
- January 22, 2020 – Virginia Democrats began to dismantle abortion restrictions erected by Republicans over the past decade, pushing an omnibus bill to the House floor on a 12-to-9 party-line vote. The bill would expand the categories of health professionals who can perform abortions, remove requirements for ultrasounds, waiting periods, and eliminate rules that made some clinics ineligible to perform the procedure. House Majority Leader Charniele Herring, D-Alexandria, said, “This bill concerns an incredibly important decision that should be left up to a woman and her healthcare provider.” Meanwhile, the Trump administration restored $350 million in federal funding to Texas which had been cut during the Obama administration because Texas excluded Planned Parenthood from its ”Healthy Texas Women” program which offers family planning, pregnancy tests, and breast cancer exams to low-income women.
- January 22, 2021 – In the UK, Nichola Salvato, a single mother brought a legal challenge against the government over its universal credit childcare payments system. She argued that the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) requirement that she pay hundreds of pounds upfront to childcare providers before she could claim back the money through universal credit plunged her into debt and forced her to reduce her working hours. The court ruled that the “proof of payment” rule disproportionally discriminated against women, who account for about 80% of all universal credit childcare payment claimants, and had left Salvato worse off financially and psychologically. In a judgment issued by Mr Justice Chamberlain, he said the childcare payment system, which estimates suggest will be used eventually by 500,000 UK parents when universal credit is fully rolled out, was irrational and subjected Salvato and other mothers to indirect sex discrimination under human rights law. Salvato, who is a welfare rights adviser, said she was “over the moon” about the ruling, saying it was “ridiculous” that hard-up families had to find the money for childcare costs upfront, while better-off families earning up to £200,000 a year could get help for their childcare costs in advance through the tax system. “I’m so very pleased that the judge has ruled that the way that childcare costs are administered through universal credit at the moment is unlawful, and I really hope that the DWP recognise that a speedy change to the system is going to have an enormous and very welcome impact on the lives of hundreds of thousands of lower-income families across the country, the very group of people that the government says it wants to help,” she said.
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- January 23, 1585 – Mary Ward born, English Roman Catholic nun, instrumental in the founding of the Congregation of Jesus and the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The institute was based on the structure of the men’s Society of Jesus, and began to open schools for girls in 1609 beyond the walls that enclosed all other religious women, a radical idea at a time when sisters were limited to either teaching boarding students or nursing the sick in hospitals attached to their houses. In addition to being free from enclosure, Ward and her followers were free from the obligation of choir, from wearing a religious habit, and from the jurisdiction of the local bishop. Controversy raged, mostly because of the declaration by Pope Pius V (1566-1572) that solemn vows and strict papal enclosure were essential to all communities of religious women. Ward’s congregation was suppressed by the church in 1631, but it was gradually revived. She traveled throughout Europe, founding schools, then established her institute in London, opening free schools for the poor, nursing the sick and visiting prisoners. In 1642, she moved to Heworth, near York, and founded a convent there. She died in 1645, at St. Mary’s School in the siege of York during the English Civil War. After her death, the Rule of her second institute was at length approved by Pope Clement XI, in 1703.
- January 23, 1813 – Camilla Collett born, Norwegian writer, an early contributor to Norwegian literary realism, and a pioneer in Nordic feminism; Amtmandens Døtre (The District Governor’s Daughters) is her only novel; her marriage was a happy one, but only lasted 10 years before her husband died unexpectedly, leaving her with four young sons, and plunging her into near-poverty for the rest of her life; after his death, she wrote essays, literary criticism, polemics and her memoirs; her polemics call for social and political change to expand women’s education and opportunities, opposing bringing up girls to be reticent and self-sacrificing.
- January 23, 1849 – Elizabeth Blackwell becomes the first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States, from the Geneva Medical College in New York state.
- January 23, 1889 – Claribel Kendall born, American mathematician who earned her master’s degree from the University of Colorado in 1914. She taught mathematics at the University of Colorado, while spending summers at the University of Chicago working on her doctorate. In 1920, she received a fellowship from the University of Chicago which aided her in completing her degree, earning her PhD in 1922. Her work on “Certain Congruences Determined by a Given Surface” was published in The American Journal of Mathematics in 1923. Kendall taught at the University of Colorado until her retirement in 1957. During her tenure, she directed master’s theses for eight women, and was first member of the university’s mathematics department to be honored with the Robert L. Stearns Award for outstanding service. Kendall was a charter member of the Mathematical Association of America.
- January 23, 1894 – Jyotirmoyee Devi born, Indian writer born in Jaipur; while she had very little formal education, she was allowed to read whatever she liked in her grandfather’s well-stocked library. She didn’t begin writing until after the death of her husband in 1918 during the world-wide influenza epidemic, when as a Hindu she had to return to her parents’ house with four of her children and into enforced seclusion, while one child remained with her husband’s family. After reading John Stuart Mill’s “On the Subjection of Women,” she remained conservative in her behavior, but vowed to treat her daughters and sons equally, and wrote some non-fiction on the rights of women and the Dalits (so-called ‘untouchables’). However, she is best known for her short stories, mostly about women, inspired by her childhood in Jaipur, or set in the section of the Bengal region which is now Bangladesh, featuring her understated dry wit and sharp sociological observations.
- January 23, 1897 – Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky born, first woman student at Vienna’s arts school, Kunstgewerbeschule, and the first woman Austrian architect. She designed affordable council housing for the working classes, collaborated with Adolf Loos on settlements for WWI invalids and veterans, and worked for the Austrian Association for Settlements and Small Gardens. The city council of Frankfurt am Main hired her for the Frankfurt Project, for which she designed the Frankfurt Kitchen, a prototype for the built-in kitchen, one of her most notable achievements. She was a communist activist during WWII in the German resistance against the Nazis.
- January 23, 1897 – Ieva (or Ewa) Simonaitytė born, Lithuanian writer, noted for her cultural representation of the minority Lithuanian population in the territories of German East Prussia, and her best-known novel, Aukštujų Šimonių likimas (The Fate of Šimoniai from Aukštujai).
- January 23, 1898 – Freda Utley born, English author, scholar, and pro-labor activist. Utley married a Russian economist in 1928 and moved to Moscow. She fled to England with their son after her husband’s arrest in 1936, and used all her British contacts to try to find her husband and secure his release, not learning he had died in 1938 until 1956, which made her virulently anti-communist. She moved to the U.S. in 1939, where she published The Dream We Lost, about her experiences in Russia, and disillusionment with communism. She became an American citizen in 1950. She helped Senator Joseph McCarthy compile his list of highly placed suspected communists, but later Utley held that McCarthy had been “captured by the forces of the ultra-right and thereby led to destruction.”
- January 23, 1902 – Lucile Leone born, American nurse known for upgrading the programs of the U.S. Nurse Corps, including founding in 1943 the Cadet Nurse Corps, which paid all tuition fees for nurse candidates in the program. The Nurse Corps overall grew to 180,000 by 1948. She was the chief nurse officer of U.S. Public Health, and the first nurse and first woman appointed as Assistant Surgeon General (1949-1966). Leone was honored by the International Red Cross with the Florence Nightingale Medal. The Lucile Petry Leone Award is now given biennially by the National League for Nursing "to an outstanding nurse educator."
- January 23, 1909 – Tatiana Proskouriakoff born, American archaeologist and scholar who prepared reconstructive drawings of Mayan buildings that are now in ruins, and contributed significantly to the deciphering of Mayan hieroglyphs, the writing system of pre-Columbian Maya civilization, by demonstrating that the hieroglyphs on monumental stela and buildings were historical records of Maya rulers’ births, accessions, and deaths rather than imagistic prophecy, then demonstrating a sequence of seven rulers over a 200 year span.
- January 23, 1910– Irene Sharaff born, outstanding American costume designer for 40 movies (for which she won five Oscars), 60 Broadway shows, as well as the American Ballet Theatre, the New York City Ballet, and the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo.
- January 23, 1918 – Gertrude B. Elion born, American pharmacologist; the co-recipient, with George Hitchings and James Black, of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Medicine for development of drugs to treat leukemia, gout, and malaria, as well as drugs used in organ transplants to help prevent transplant rejection. Research by Elion and Hitchings produced the first drugs specifically designed for cancer therapy, as well as drugs to combat rejection of transplanted organs, gout, malaria, and bacterial and viral infections. These medications became well-proven in use over many years, and their drugs appeared on the World Health Organization’s "Essential Drugs" list, as medicines which should be available worldwide to promote "Health for All." Elion held 45 patents, including one for 2-Amino-6-Mercaptopurine, the first major medicine to fight leukemia.
- January 23, 1918 – Florence Rush born, American psychiatric social worker, feminist theorist, author, and organizer; noted for introducing the “Freudian Coverup” in her paper “The Sexual Abuse of Children: A Feminist Point of View,” which challenged Freudian theories of children having erotic fantasies, or seducing adults, rather than being victims of sexual abuse. She published The Best Kept Secret: The Sexual Abuse of Children in 1980. Rush was a co-founder of Women Against Pornography, and a member of the New York State Psychiatric Institute’s Advisory Committee on the Treatment of Sexual Aggressors.
- January 23, 1921 – Marija Gimbutas born, Lithuanian-American archaeologist and author; noted for The Prehistory of Modern Europe, and The Civilization of the Goddess.
- January 23, 1921 – Jeanne Moreau born, French actress, screenwriter, and director. In 1971, she was a signer of the Manifesto of the 343 – in which prominent French women each publicly announced she had obtained an illegal abortion, an act of civil disobedience which left them open to criminal prosecution. The manifesto was published in the weekly magazine Le Nouvel Observateur on April 5, 1971, and called for the legalization of abortion and free access to contraception. The manifesto launched the campaign which led to France legalizing abortion in 1975.
- January 23, 1933 – Chita Rivera born, American actress, dancer, and singer; best known for her roles on Broadway, she was the first Hispanic woman and the first person of Puerto Rican heritage to receive a Kennedy Center Honors award (2002). Rivera was also awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009.
- January 23, 1950 – Suzanne Scotchmer born, American Professor of Law Economics and Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley; noted for many publications on subjects ranging from intellectual property to game theory; one of the leading and most prominent experts in patent law and incentives for Research and Development, she was frequently an expert witness in patent cases. Her death in 2014 was caused by cancer.
- January 23, 1962 – Elvira Lindo born, Spanish broadcast journalist, scriptwriter, and novelist; noted for her book Manolito Gafotas, based on one of the characters she developed for a radio serial; currently living in New York City with her husband Antonio Muñoz Molina, director of the Instituto Cervantes of New York. She is a contributor to the Spanish-language newspaper, El País.
- January 23, 1964 – Mariska Hargitay born, American actress, director, and executive producer; noted as the founder in 2004 of the Joyful Heart Foundation, which provides support to survivors of sexual abuse.
- January 23, 1976 – Anne Margrethe Hausken born, Norwegian orienteering champion. Orienteering is a sport testing skills in using a map and compass to navigate from point to point. She won her first medals at the 1986 Junior World Championships. At the 2008 World Championships in Olomouc, she won a gold medal in the Sprint event, and in 2009, she and her team won gold in the Relay. At the World Cup in 2008, she won gold in the Overall. Hauksen also has a Doctorate. Her thesis was entitled Epidemiology of anxiolytic and hypnotic drug use in the general population in Norway.
- January 23, 2018 – U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth (Democrat-Illinois) announced that she was expecting her second child. Duckworth, 49, gave birth to her first child, daughter Abigail O'kalani Bowlsbey, in November 2014 while still a member of the House. Duckworth is the 10th woman to have a child while serving in Congress — Representative Yvonne Brathwaite Burke (Democrat-California) was the first, in 1973. When Duckworth gave birth to her second daughter, Maile Pearl Bowlsbey, she became the first U.S. senator to give birth in office. She lost both legs in 2004 during the Iraq War when the Black Hawk helicopter she was piloting was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. Duckworth was elected to the Senate in 2016 after serving in the House for two terms.
- January 23, 2019 – Arizona police arrested an employee at Hacienda Healthcare on sexual assault charges after a 29-year-old woman in a semi-vegetative state at a Phoenix facility gave birth. The 36-year-old suspect worked as a licensed practical nurse at the facility, and had been responsible for the woman at the time of the rape, which resulted in her pregnancy. Police arrested him after they obtained his DNA and it matched the baby's. The victim's family said in a statement through their lawyer that she "has significant intellectual disabilities as a result of seizures very early in her childhood." The statement added that she "is a beloved daughter" who "has feelings, likes to be read to, enjoys soft music, and is capable of responding to people she is familiar with, especially family."
- January 23, 2020 – After the ruling that civil partnerships were not limited to same sex couples, but could also be registered by a couple consisting of a man and a woman, the Bishops of the Church of England issued ‘pastoral guidance’ in response to mixed-sex and same-sex civil partnerships, “For Christians, marriage – that is, the lifelong union between a man and a woman, contracted with the making of vows – remains the proper context for sexual activity.” The church “seeks to uphold that standard” in its approach to civil partnerships, and “to affirm the value of committed, sexually abstinent friendships” within [civil] partnerships. . . Sexual relationships outside heterosexual marriage are regarded as falling short of God’s purpose for human beings.” Jayne Ozanne, a campaigner for LGBT rights and a member of the C of E’s ruling body, the General Synod, said: “I’m sadly unsurprised by the content of this statement but I’m deeply saddened by its tone. It will appear far from ‘pastoral’ to those it discusses and shows little evidence of the ‘radical new Christian inclusion’ that we have been promised. I look forward to the day when the C of E sets its house in order, extends a proper welcome to all, and makes confused ‘pastoral statements’ like this redundant.” Linda Woodhead, professor of philosophy and religion at Lancaster University, commented, “The C of E is unable to get over its fixation on homosexuality, which is driving the national church into a position more like a fundamentalist sect and does not speak to the vast majority of younger people today.”
- January 23, 2021 – In celebration of the 19th Amendment, the Lawrence F. O’Brien Gallery of the National Archives Museum in Washington DC is continuing its exhibition, Rightfully Hers: American Women and the Vote, which was launched in 2020, highlighting the relentless struggle of diverse activists throughout U.S. history to secure voting rights for all American women. Curated by Corinne Porter, the exhibit features many original documents and artifacts housed at the National Archive, and will continue through April 10, 2022. There is an online version: https://museum.archives.gov/rightfully-hers
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- January 24, 1547 – Joanna of Austria born, an Archduchess of Austria; at age 18, she was married to Francesco I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, but it was not a happy marriage. Her husband ignored her, openly preferring his mistress, Bianca Cappello, who gave birth to a son in 1576, while Joanna suffered through the births of six daughters in the nine years between 1566 and 1575, but only two reached adulthood, and the rest died at birth or in infancy. Finally in 1577, Joanna gave birth to the son and heir demanded of her, but Filippo suffered from hydrocephalus (cerebrospinal fluid accumulating in the brain). In 1578, Joanna was heavily pregnant with her eighth child when she fell down the stairs, and went into premature labor. The baby, another male, died immediately after being born, and she died the next day. There were rumors that Francesco and/or Bianca were involved in her accident on the stairs, but modern medical investigation of her remains confirm the official report of her death as caused by the birth (the child presented arm first, and Joanna’s uterus ruptured). But Joanna also suffered from severe scoliosis – her spine and pelvis were very deformed. The condition of her pelvis must have made all her pregnancies difficult and excruciatingly painful. It is remarkable that she had survived the first seven births. Filippo, her only surviving son, died before his fifth birthday.
- January 24, 1804 – Delphine de Girardin born, French author who used the pen name Vicomte Charles Delaunay; noted for her sketches written for La Presse (1836-1839), later published as Lettres parisiennes, and her romances, including Contes d’une vieille fille a ses neveux (Tales of an Old Girl to her Nephews). She also wrote several dramatic pieces, some of them in verse, and was influential in contemporary literary society, which included Romantics Théophile Gautier and Victor Hugo, and early Realists like Alfred de Musset and Honoré de Balzac.
- January 24, 1836 – Signe Rink born and grew up in Greenland, Danish writer and ethnologist; co-founder with her husband, geologist Hinrich Rink, of Atuagagdliutit, Greenland’s first newspaper (1861). Also noted as the first woman to study and publish works on Greenland and the Inuit culture, including Grønlændere, Grønlændere og Danske i Grønland, Koloni-Idyller fra Grønland. She collected folk tales, and a number of illustrations by Aron of Kangeq for folk tales which showed everyday life in Greenland. After moving to Denmark in 1868, she donated the illustrations to the National Museum of Denmark. This collection was later transferred the National Museum of Greenland, when it was established in the 1960s.
- January 24, 1858 – Constance Naden born, English writer, poet, and philosopher; she studied botany and French at Birmingham and Midland Institute (1879-1880), then studied physics, geology, chemistry, physiology, and zoology at Mason Science College (1881-1887), and edited the Mason college magazine. She became a member of the Birmingham Natural History Society. Noted as co-developer with Dr. Robert Lewins of Hylo-Idealism, a philosophy based on the principle that “Man is the maker of his own Cosmos, and all his perceptions – even those which seem to represent solid, extended and external objects – have a merely subjective existence, bounded by the limits moulded by the character and conditions of his sentient being.” Naden published her first volume of poetry, Songs and Sonnets of Springtime, in 1881. In 1885, she won the Paxton Prize for an essay on the geology of the district. In her second poetry collection, A Modern Apostle, the Elixir of Life, published in 1887, contains her best-known poems, the ‘Evolutional Erotics’ a humorous series based on Darwin’s theory of sexual selection. She won the 1887 Heslop gold medal for her essay Induction and Deduction. That same year, she was left a considerable fortune for the time in her grandmother’s will, and she began to travel with her friend and women’s rights campaigner Madeline Daniell. Returning to England in 1888, she bought a house and shared it with Daniell. She also raised funds to allow Indian women to study medicine, and became a member of the National Indian Association in Aid of Social Progress in India, which raised money for a scholarship fund for the education of Indian girls, especially to overcome the lack of female teachers for Hindu girls. She also did some public speaking in favor of women’s suffrage. She died in December 1889, of infection after surgery for ovarian cysts. The Constance Naden Medal was founded at Mason Science College (which merged into the University of Birmingham in 1900).
- January 24, 1862 – Edith Wharton born, American novelist, short story writer, and playwright; best known for Ethan Frome and The Age of Innocence. In 1921, she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature, for The Age of Innocence. Wharton was an enthusiastic supporter of French imperialism, and wrote In Morocco about her visit there as a guest of the French Resident General Hubert Lyautey and his wife, which was full of praise for the French administration.
- January 24, 1864 – Marguerite Durand born, French actress, journalist, leading women’s rights advocate, and suffragette; she founded the feminist newspaper La Fronde (The Slingshot), exclusively run by women, advocating for women’s admission to the Bar Association and the École des Beaux-Arts. During the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris, she organized the Congress for the Rights of Women, and also helped to organize several trade unions for working women. Durand was a famous sight in Paris because she took daily walks with her pet lion, Tigre. In 1931, she gave the bulk of her enormous collection of papers to the City of Paris, which became the foundation of the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand, the first public feminist library in France, still one of the best sources for research on women’s history and the women’s movement.
- January 24, 1888 – ‘Vicki’ Hedwig Baum born, Austrian novelist, best known for Menschen im Hotel, published in English as Grand Hotel, the basis for the classic 1932 film of the same title which starred Greta Garbo.
- January 24, 1910 – Doris Haddock born, American political activist who at age 88, began a walk of over 3,200 miles (5,140 km) across the U.S. to advocate for campaign finance reform. She completed her walk almost 14 months later at the age of 90.
- January 24, 1915 – Vítězslava Kaprálová born, Czech composer and conductor; born into a musical family, she started composing at the age of nine. Kaprálová began five years at the Brno Conservatory in 1930, learning composition with Vilém Petrželka, and conducting with Zdeněk Chalabala. She continued her education in Prague and Paris. In 1937, she conducted the Czech Philharmonic, and in 1938, the BBC Orchestra, in her composition Military Sinfonietta. She was in Paris when the Nazis invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia, and the stipend from home that she had been living on was cut off. She lived precariously on small musical commissions, and financial help from friends. She pooled resources with other Czech exiles to live communally, and met Czech journalist and author Jiri Mucha. She was already growing ill, but they were married in April 1940 anyway. In June, 1940, she died at age 25 of tuberculosis. In 1946, she was posthumously awarded membership in the Czech Academy of Sciences and the Arts, one of only ten women, and the only woman musician, to be awarded membership.
- January 24, 1925 – Maria Tallchief born, first major American prima ballerina, and the first of the Native American ‘Five Moons’ ballerinas. She danced with Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, and was the first star of the New York City Ballet, where she gave notable performances in The Firebird, and as the Sugar Plum Fairy in The Nutcracker. She was also the first American to perform in Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre. After retiring from dancing, she became the director of ballet for the Lyric Opera of Chicago in the 1970s.
- January 24, 1926 – Ruth Asawa born, American sculptor, passionate activist for art education, and a driving force behind the San Francisco School of Arts, now renamed the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of Arts.
- January 24, 1927 – Paula Hawkins born, American Republican politician; the first and only woman to date to be elected to the U.S. Senate (1981-1987) from the state of Florida. She began her career in 1972 with successful campaign as a consumer advocate for a seat on the Florida Public Service Commission. During her tenure as U.S. Senator, she was the main sponsor of the 1982 Missing Children’s Act, and in 1983 chaired the Investigation and Oversight Subcommittee of the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee, where she launched an investigation of the increase of children reported missing. In 1984, she revealed that she had been the victim of sexual abuse as a child, and her book, Children at Risk, My Fight Against Child Abuse: A Personal Story and a Public Plea, was published in 1986. After losing her 1986 bid for re-election, she served for seven years as the U.S. representative to the Organization of American States Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission (OAS - CICAD).
- January 24, 1932 – Éliane Radigue born, French electronic music composer; her later work has been influenced by her conversion to Tibetan Buddhism.
- January 24, 1955 – Lynda Weinman born, American special effects film animator, computer software training developer, and author; co-founder with her husband Bruce Heavin of Lynda.com, which was acquired by LinkedIn in April 2015 for $1.5 billion USD. She is the author of many books on web graphics.
- January 24, 1966 – Indira Gandhi is sworn in as the first woman Prime Minister of India.
- January 24, 1968 – Mary Lou Retton born; despite congenital hip dysplasia, she became the first American woman to win a gold medal in All-Around in gymnastics at the Olympics (1984), and is now a frequent analyst for televised gymnastics.
- January 24, 1978 – Kristen Schaal born, comedian, actress, writer, and voice for animated characters; also noted as a commentator on The Daily Show; she is a supporter of women’s rights, and a critic of Donald Trump and the Republicans in Congress.
- January 24, 1981 – Rubaiyat Hossain born, Bangladeshi filmmaker, writer, and producer. Noted for her films Meherjaan, Under Construction, and Made in Bangladesh. She is an advocate for women’s rights, and in 2007 was one of the coordinators of the first international workshop on Sexuality and Rights sponsored by the BRAC School of Public Health.
- January 24, 1985 – Penny Harrington, the first U.S. woman police chief of a major city, assumes her duties as head of the Portland, Oregon, force of 940 officers and staff. She cut back the drug and vice squads to increase neighborhood patrols, and introduced the idea that officers should spend less time responding to calls and more time talking to citizens. (Her strategy is now called community policing.) Harrington also wanted to overcome the history of tension with the black community, and cut down on the use of excessive force. She lasted 17 months before she was driven out, after she called for firing four white officers, two involved in the use of a chokehold which killed a black civilian who was the victim of the crime, not the perpetrator. An inquest found Stevenson's death criminally negligent homicide, but the officer at fault and the other officer involved were never charged. Two other white officers wore t-shirts, and sold them in the East Precinct parking lot, showing a gun and the slogan, “Don’t Choke ’em, Smoke ’em.” Though they were fired, both men got their jobs back. In 1987, Harrington filed a federal sex discrimination suit claiming that members of the police department "conspired to embarrass and drive her from office." making it difficult for her to obtain employment following her "forced" resignation. In 1988, Harrington became a special assistant to the California State Bar's director of investigations to "handle a wide range of special projects, including training and computers." In 1995, she founded The National Center for Women & Policing with Katherine Spillar, Executive Vice President of the Feminist Majority Foundation. The NCWP aims to promote increasing the number of women throughout all ranks of law enforcement in an effort to improve police response to violence against women, as well as reduce police brutality and excessive force, and improve and expand community policing.
- January 24, 2019 – Europe's top human rights court ordered Italy to pay $20,800 in compensation to Amanda Knox, ruling that her rights were violated in the hours following her 2007 arrest after the killing of her British housemate, Meredith Kercher, in Perugia, Italy. The European Court of Human Rights said Italian authorities failed to provide Knox, who was 20 years old and not fluent in Italian, with a lawyer and an appropriate interpreter in the early hours of her detention. The court found no evidence supporting her claim of mistreatment in police custody. Knox was freed in 2011 after nearly four years in detention, then retried and convicted in absentia before she and her former boyfriend were finally cleared of any connection to Kercher’s murder in 2015.
- January 24, 2019 – When Yumi Ishikawa, a Japanese freelance writer and funeral home employee, tweeted, “Someday I want to get rid of the practice of women having to wear heels and pumps at work,” she had no idea that she was starting the #KuToo movement (a play on #MeToo, and two Japanese words - kutsu, shoes - and kutsuu, pain). Her comment went viral, so she launched a petition for a ban on high-heel requirements by employers. By the time she submitted her petition to Japan’s Ministry of Health in June, about 19,000 people had signed it, and by December, there were over 31,500 signatures. It sparked a national debate, media headlines, and TV programmes in Japan, and was picked up by the international media, prompting celebrities like Cyndi Lauper to tweet photos of themselves wearing flat shoes in support of the cause. Ishikawa told an interviewer, “The bashing started right after that tweet. My attitude was [considered] ‘arrogant’. I was unashamed so people assumed someone very mean had spoken out . . . I started #KuToo because I had something to share with society and my message went through. The movement could get going thanks to everyone’s efforts. This is proof that we collectively need to talk about this issue.” In 2021, Business Insider named Yumi Ishikawa to their annual list of the Ten Leaders Transforming Media in Asia.
- January 24, 2020 – U.S. intelligence authorities urged their British counterparts to keep a close eye on Hatice Cengiz, fiancée of murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, after they became aware of a plan by Saudi Arabia to keep her under surveillance in the United Kingdom in 2019, UK newspapers reported. Cengiz, who is Turkish, is an articulate and passionate advocate for justice for Khashoggi: “There is no body, no grave. I have no place where I can mourn. And as remarkable as the illegality and ruthlessness of my fiance’s murder was the manner in which his killers committed it. This was an assault on a man who was not the enemy of the Saudi government but a reformer, with only the best interests of his people in mind. He was a former man of the palace, a man who exemplified the dedication to openness and fidelity that his profession demanded … And if we, as an international community bound by a shared commitment to the most basic human values, choose to neglect or ignore or indeed deny this injustice, then further injustices will surely follow.” The U.S. believed the Saudis had the “ambition and intention” to monitor Cengiz in London in May 2019, seven months after Khashoggi was brutally killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, where he had gone to obtain papers so the couple could marry. Cengiz was waiting for him outside the embassy, and reported that he was missing when he didn’t come out. U.S. intelligence agencies are required under law to warn individuals if they are known to face an imminent risk of murder, kidnapping and serious bodily harm, according to a 2015 directive that is known as the “duty to warn.” The revelation about Cengiz suggests that, far from reining in a Saudi campaign to silence critics at home and abroad, the Saudi government has not changed its policy, but is only acting with a little more circumspection. French human rights activist Agnès Callamard, who is an independent expert on extrajudicial killings for the UN, investigated the murder, and presented a damning report which revealed harrowing details of Khashoggi’s last moments, and concluded that it was a state-sponsored killing. She says the plan to spy on Cengiz shows a “pattern of targeted surveillance of perceived opponents” of the kingdom, especially people who are of “strategic importance.” Saudi Arabia has previously denied using surveillance tools against human rights activists and critics of the Saudi kingdom.
- January 24, 2021 – When Kristalina Georgieva took over as chair and managing director of the International Monetary Fund in 2019, she said she wanted a different direction for the IMF, which had been widely criticized for imposing “structural adjustment programmmes” on poor countries that harmed their public sectors, including healthcare systems, and for promoting aggressive privatisation and other stringent measures, while ignoring social and environmental considerations. “The IMF can do the right thing,” she said. “What the IMF brings is incredible ambition, analysis, policy and financial skills to transition to a new climate economy. We are the only institution that regularly takes the pulse of regional, national and global economy. We recognise that climate change is a macro-critical factor.” She says that helping the most vulnerable people to cope with the climate crisis can boost the global economy during the Covid crisis and governments should make this a priority, insisting that international responses to the pandemic must urgently take account of the need to adapt to the impacts of extreme weather and other climate shocks, as well as reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Otherwise, the world risked billions of dollars of economic damage in the near future, as most countries were unprepared for the effects of a rapidly heating climate, she warned. “The good news is that it can be win-win-win-win,” she said. “Building resilience can be good for nature and ecosystems; it can be good for economic growth; at a time when economies have lost low-skilled jobs, it boosts job creation; and the fourth win is that it can bring health benefits.” Georgieva pledged help from the IMF to countries hit by the climate crisis, and to those seeking to fulfill the Paris agreement. “What we want is for countries to think of the IMF as a source of help, and not be afraid to come to us. We want to build buffers to these shocks for countries that are highly vulnerable.” These measures could not wait, she warned. “The impact of a changing climate is already upon us, hitting vulnerable countries and vulnerable people most severely. These are countries that are often already experiencing economic and social problems.”
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The Free Love Feminist Phalarope
The Red-Necked Phalarope is a small shore bird which is also at home on the open ocean. It is a long-distance migrant, which breeds in the Arctic tundra and winters in tropical oceans. This phalarope sometimes migrates over land, particularly in autumn.
The female phalarope is the more brightly colored and aggressive sex. Females get into fierce fights over the males they want to mate with. Then after they’ve laid their eggs, they take no part in raising the young, and often seek out another male, and lay another clutch.