.
WOW2 is a four-times-a-month sister blog to This Week in the War on Women.
“Women can save civilization only by
the broadest cooperative action, by
taking part in greater numbers in
government, by daring to think, by
daring to be themselves. The world
is calling for women of vision and
courage. May the women of the
world hear the call and go forward!”
– Harriot Stanton Blatch,
American suffragist and author
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“My mother used to tell me … ‘Kamala,
you may be the first to do many things,
but make sure you are not the last …
And that’s why breaking those barriers
is worth it. As much as anything else,
it is also to create that path for
those who will come after us.”
– Kamala Harris,
first woman to be Vice President
of the United States of America
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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.
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.
WOW2 began as a once-a-month post, then as more and more trailblazing women were added to the lists, it expanded until it became a four-times-a-month post. The lists became so long that I’m switching to posting only a selection of these amazing trailblazers — for those who want to see the glorious much more complete list of outstanding women for this week, click:
www.dailykos.com/…
THIS WEEK IN THE WAR ON WOMEN
has posted, so be sure to go there next, and
catch up on the latest dispatches from the frontlines:
www.dailykos.com/...
Many, 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 much thanks to wow2lib, WOW2’s Librarian Emeritus.
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, 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, 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, 1922 – Betty White born, American actress, TV personality, animal and civil 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. 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, 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, 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, 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, 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. As First Lady and after leaving the White House, she has been an advocate for LGBTQ+ rights, for more educational opportunities for girls, and in 2021 appeared for the nonprofit VoteRiders in Georgia to encourage people to make sure they had the ID required to vote in that state. Her memoir, Becoming, had sold over 17 million copies worldwide by July 2022.
- January 17, 1997 – A Republic of Ireland court grants the first divorce in this predominantly Catholic country since it gained its independence from Britain in 1922. The Constitution of Ireland adopted in 1937 had included a constitutional ban on divorce. In spite of heavy opposition from the Roman Catholic Church, this ban was overthrown when a referendum in November 1995 was passed, by a 50.28% YES to 49.72% NO vote.
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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, 2021 – The Center for American Progress reported that a record 2,276 women, including 552 women of color, began serving as state legislators. They represented 30% of state legislators nationwide. Nevada was the only state where women represented 50% or more of the state’s legislators. By the end of 2021, the percentage of women legislators had risen to 31%, and 26% of the women were women of color.
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- 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, 1905 – Oveta Culp Hobby born, second woman in U.S. Cabinet (20 years after Frances Perkins), the first Secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (1953-1955). She was awarded the Distinguished Medal of Service for her work as the first Director of the Women’s Army Corps (1942-1945).
- 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, 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.
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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, 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. She graduated from Vassar College with a degree in mathematics in 1878, then went to Germany as a tutor for girls. She met an English brewery manager named William Henry Blatch during her voyage returning to the U.S., and they were married in 1882. She worked with her mother, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Susan B. Anthony on the History of Woman Suffrage, contributing a major chapter to the second volume about the American Woman Suffrage Association, rivals of Stanton and Anthony's National Woman Suffrage Association, which helped to reconcile the two organizations. In England she made a statistical study of rural English working women's conditions, for which she received her M.A. from Vassar. She also worked with English social reform groups, including the Women's Local Government Society, the Fabian Society, and the Women's Franchise League. She developed organizing techniques for the Women's Franchise League that she would later use in America. In 1902, she returned to the U.S. to join the leadership of the Women's Trade Union League. In 1907, she founded the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women (later renamed the Women's Political Union), to recruit working class women into the suffrage movement. The core membership of the league comprised 20,000 factory, laundry, and garment workers from the Lower East Side of New York City. The organization successfully lobbied for an equal pay resolution for New York teachers. She also organized and led the 1910 New York suffrage parade. She helped organize working women at the same time she was wooing society women to contribute to the suffrage cause. Blatch’s book Mobilizing Woman Power inspired others to organize. In 1915, the Women’s Political Union merged with the Congressional Union founded by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, which became the National Woman’s Party in 1916. When the party’s Silent Sentinels, who picketed in front of the White House six days a week in all weathers from January 1917 to June 1919, were arrested and thrown into a workhouse, abused, beaten, and then force-fed when they went on a hunger strike, it made national headlines. This brought greater recognition and sympathy to the cause. President Woodrow Wilson, who had given lukewarm support to suffrage for women at the state and local level but opposed national suffrage, changed his position, and in 1918 made a speech to Congress supporting full voting rights for women. The 19th Amendment was finally ratified in August, 1920. Blatch’s daughter, Nora Stanton Blatch Barney, was also a suffragist, and became the first U.S. woman to earn a degree in civil engineering. Harriot Stanton Blatch died at age 84 in 1940.
- 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, 1954 – Alison Seabeck born, British Labour politician; Member of Parliament for Plymouth Moor View (2005-2015); active member of the Fawcett Society, named for British suffragist Millicent Fawcett, and the Labour Women’s Network.
- January 20, 2016 – In Zimbabwe, two former child brides won their case against child marriage in their country’s Constitutional Court. Loveness Mudzuru and Ruvimbo Tsopodzi asked for child marriage to be declared illegal and unconstitutional, saying it was a form of child abuse which trapped girls in lives of poverty and suffering. The court struck down a section of the Marriage Act which allows girls to marry at 16 but boys at 18, and ruled that as of this day no one in Zimbabwe may enter into any marriage, including customary law unions, before the age of 18. “I really am happy that we have played an instrumental part in making Zimbabwe a safe place for girls,” said Mudzuru, who was married at 16 and had two children before she was 18.
- January 20, 2021 – Kamala Harris is sworn as the first woman Vice President of the United States.
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- 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, 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, 1941 – Elaine Showalter born, American writer, literary critic, and pioneer in feminist literary criticism in U.S. academia; known for Teaching Literature; The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830-1980; and Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage.
- 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, 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 all across the country.
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- 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, 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, 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, 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. Her younger sister Emily became the third woman to follow in her footsteps, and worked with Elizabeth at her New York Infirmary for Women and Children, which led to the founding of the Woman’s Medical College of New York, a full medical college, which began operations in 1868.
- 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, 1918 – Florence Rush born, American psychiatric social worker, feminist, author, and organizer; the first feminist theorist to call children’s sexual abuse a political and patriarchal issue, exposing 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. She died in December 2008 at age 90.
- 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, 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, 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, which continued through April 10, 2022.
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- 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, 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, 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, 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, 2021 – U.S. media organizations took steps to mirror Joe Biden’s gender-balanced cabinet appointments. At least six major news networks assigned women to lead White House coverage. CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, the public television station PBS and the Washington Post assigned chief reporting duties to women. The list includes women of colour, like PBS’s Yamiche Alcindor and NBC’s Kristen Welker, who in October 2020 became the first black woman to moderate a general-election presidential debate in almost 30 years, and kept it on track, something which had eluded recent male debate moderators. American political commentator Keli Goff said, “If the events of the last year have shown us anything, it’s that it is essential to have institutions of power that reflect our nation’s diversity, and for newsrooms that cover those institutions to reflect our nation’s diversity as well.” The selections mark a turnaround for the White House press corps, traditionally dominated by men. Exceptions like trailblazer Helen Thomas were rare, but she served as White House correspondent for UPI and AP for over half a century before retiring in 2010.
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For those of you who want to dive deeper,
the rest of the list of this week’s Women
Trailblazers and Events in Women’s History
is here:
www.dailykos.com/...
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