February is Black History Month
“Mobile phone technology can help to
bring financial services to the 80% of
African women who do not have a bank
account and bolster the growth of the
world’s poorest continent. It’s not just
about empowering women, it’s about
economic growth. Unless we can make
access to finance easier for women in
their businesses, we will be missing out
on a significant portion of growth
within our economies.”
– Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala,
first woman and first African leader to
head the World Trade Organization
________________
WOW2 is a four-times-a-month sister blog to This Week in the War on Women.
“The time when you need to do
something is when no one else
is willing to do it, when people
are saying it can’t be done.”
– Mary Frances Berry,
American historian, and
civil rights activist
________________
“In all his imaginings, he had never
envisioned her crying. He knew that
her son had died, but he’d never
expected that her pain might be
anything he could recognize, almost
as though he believed that Negroes
had their own special kind of
grieving ritual, another language,
something other than tears they
used to express their sadness.”
– Bebe Moore Campbell, from
Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine
________________
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 and much more complete list of outstanding women for this week, click:
www.dailykos.com/...
THIS WEEK IN THE WAR ON WOMEN
just 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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- February 15, 1638 – Zeb-un-Nissa born, Mughal princess and poet who wrote under the pseudonym Makhfi (Hidden One). She was carefully educated by Hafiza Mariam, and by age seven, she had become a Hafiza (female title for one who has memorized the Quran). She also studied the sciences of the day with Mohammad Saeed Ashraf Mazandarani, and learned mathematics, philosophy, astronomy, literature, the Persian, Arabic and Urdu languages, calligraphy, and music. Zeb-un-Nissa had a large library of her own, and was a patron of several scholars. She was noted for both her poetry and her song lyrics. When her father became emperor after Shah Jahan, he sometimes discussed political affairs with her, but in 1681 or 1682, her father had her imprisoned at Salimgarh Fort, Delhi, but there are conflicting accounts of why. Sources variously claim she had an affair (a rumor which may have started because she rejected all her suitors and never married), became too public with her poetry and music, or supported her younger brother during a conflict over the succession. She died after about 20 years in prison, either in 1701 or 1702. In 1724, her surviving writings were collected in the Diwan-i-Makhfi, (Book of the Hidden One). There are four hundred and twenty-one ghazals (an Arabic form of ode, using couplets) and several ruba’is (a four-line poem form in Persian poetry).
- February 15, 1820 – Susan B. Anthony born, American abolitionist, suffragist, and tireless leader of the 19th Century women’s rights movement; co-leader with Elizabeth Cady Stanton of the American Equal Rights Association, which campaigned for equal rights for women and people of color. She and Cady Stanton founded the women’s rights newspaper The Revolution, and the National Woman Suffrage Association, which later merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) where Anthony spearheaded the fight until her retirement in 1900 at the age of 80.
- February 15, 1836 – Sarah Fuller born, pioneer in education for the deaf, promoted Alexander Graham Bell’s techniques to teach deaf children to speak; founded the Home for Little Deaf Children.
- February 15, 1848 – When five-year-old Sarah Roberts was refused admittance to a white school in her Boston neighborhood because she was black, her father, Benjamin Roberts, filed the first school integration lawsuit, Roberts v. City of Boston, citing the poorer quality of education at the black school and the much greater distance Sarah had to travel to go there, but the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled in favor of Boston; the case is later cited in Plessy v. Ferguson, which established the “separate but equal” standard; however, in 1855, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts banned segregated schools in the state, the first law prohibiting segregated schools in the U.S.
- February 15, 1850 – Sophie Bryant born, Anglo-Irish mathematician, educator, and feminist. She taught at the North London Collegiate School, founded by Frances Mary Buss, a pioneer in girls’ education, which was one of the first schools where girls could get the same educational opportunities as boys. In 1895, Bryant succeeded Buss as the school’s Headmistress. When the University of London opened its degree courses to women in 1878, she became one of the first women to obtain First Class Honours, in Mental and Moral Sciences, together with a degree in mathematics in 1881, and three years later she was awarded the degree of Doctor of Science, the first woman in England to earn a doctorate in science. In 1882 she was the third woman to be elected to the London Mathematical Society, and was the first active female member, publishing her first paper with the Society in 1884. She helped to set up the Cambridge Training College for Women, now Hughes Hall, Cambridge. She was president of the Irish National Literary Society in 1914. Bryant was an advocate for improving women’s education, and thought after they were better educated, women should have the vote. She died in a hiking accident in the Swiss Alps in 1922, at age 72.
- February 15, 1879 – President Rutherford B. Hayes signs bill enabling women attorneys to argue cases before U.S. Supreme Court. On March 3, 1879, Belva Lockwood became the first woman admitted to the bar of the U.S. Supreme Court.
- February 15, 1899 – Gale Sondergaard born as Edith Holm Sondergaard, American actress who began her career touring with a Shakespeare company in the Midwest before appearing on the New York Stage. Her first film role was in Anthony Adverse in 1936. She became the first winner of the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance. She was nominated again for Best Supporting Actress for the 1946 Anna and the King of Siam, but the Oscar went to Anne Revere for National Velvet. In the late 1940s, Sondergaard’s husband, director-screenwriter Herbert Biberman, was accused of being a communist, and became one of the Hollywood Ten, writers and directors who were the first to be blacklisted for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). He went to jail for six months. Sondergaard's career also stalled. She supported her husband, writer Michael Wilson, and producer Paul Jarrico, all blacklisted, in making the film Salt of the Earth, a fictionalized version of a real life 1951 miners’ strike in New Mexico, starring Rosaura Revueltas and Will Geer. The film was released in 1954, and was panned by some critics as “communist propaganda.” She and Biberman sold their Hollywood home, and moved to New York, where Sondergaard could work in the theatre. In 1969, she appeared in an off-Broadway one-woman show entitled Woman, and began to get work in television and films again. Herbert Biberman died from bone cancer in 1971. In the 1980s, Sondergaard suffered a series of strokes, and died at age 86 in 1985.
- February 15, 1909 – Miep Gies born in Vienna, a Yad Vashem Righteous Among the Nations medal recipient, and author. She was taken in as a foster child by Dutch citizens, and became one of the people who hid Anne Frank, her family, and four other Jews in an annex above Otto Frank’s former business premises during WWII. She had worked for Otto Frank since 1933. After the discovery and arrest of the family, Gies retrieved Anne’s diary, keeping it hidden until Otto Frank came back from Auschwitz, the only member of the family to survive. Co-author with Alison Leslie Gold of Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family.
- February 15, 1910 – Irena Sendler born, Polish nurse and social worker, head of the children’s section of Żegota, a Polish underground resistance organization which smuggled about 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto, and gave them false identity papers to save them from the Holocaust.
- February 15, 1921 – The Suffrage Monument, depicting Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucretia Mott, and sculpted by Adelaide Johnson, is dedicated at the U.S. Capitol.
- February 15, 1923 – Yelena Bonner born, human rights activist in the former Soviet Union; married to Andrei Sakharov.
- February 15, 1925 – Angella D. Ferguson born, African American pediatrician noted for her ground-breaking research on sickle cell disease. She earned a BS in chemistry from Howard University, and an MD from Howard University College of Medicine in 1949, when there were very few African-American women who were accepted into medical schools. She conducted her internship and residency at Washington Freedman’s Hospital and joined the faculty at Howard University in 1953 as an instructor in pediatrics, a position she held until 1959, when she became assistant professor of pediatrics at Freedman’s Hospital, where she became a full professor (1963-1990), and also an associate pediatrician (1953-1970). Ferguson was on the staff of the District of Columbia General Hospital (1953-1990), and had her own private practice in Washington DC. Her early research required her to understand normal development in African American children, but to her surprise no such baseline data existed. In setting out to rectify this gap in knowledge, she made the startling discovery that African American infants learned to sit and stand earlier than infants of European descent. She attributed this to the number of African American infants who did not have playpens or high chairs, forcing them to sit and stand earlier than their white counterparts. She noticed the prevalence of sickle cell disease among the infants she treated in her practice, and began tracking the development of the disease in her patients. Sickle-cell anemia was then a little-known disease. Through experimentation, Ferguson determined that infants drinking a glass of soda water, which contains mineral salts, once a day before age five, decreased their chances of having a sickle-cell crisis – a condition in which the flow of damaged red blood cells is impeded, causing painful clogging of blood vessels. She also developed a blood test to detect the disease at birth, which became a standard test in forty U.S. states by 2010.
- February 15, 1935 – Susan Brownmiller born, feminist writer, novelist, historical researcher, critic, and journalist; she was a volunteer for Freedom Summer in 1964, registering black voters in Mississippi, then a staff writer for the Village Voice (1964-1965), a network news writer for ABC-TV (1966-1978), and a freelance contributor to the New York Times, Newsday, The New York Daily News, and The Nation. She was a co-founder of Women Against Pornography in 1979. Brownmiller is best known for her book Against Our Will: Men, Woman and Rape (1975), but she also published Shirley Chisholm: A Biography; Femininity; and a memoir, In Our Time.
- February 15, 1943 – In recognition and encouragement of the contribution of women to wartime production, Westinghouse Electric put up J. Howard Miller’s iconic ‘Rosie the Riveter’ painting as a poster with the caption ‘We Can Do It!’ in all their plants across the Midwest. It was an instant hit, and Westinghouse was flooded with requests for copies of the poster. The original (and different version) of ‘Rosie the Riveter’ had been painted by Norman Rockwell for the May 29, 1943, cover of The Saturday Evening Post.
- February 15, 1946 – ENIAC, the first electronic general-purpose computer, is formally dedicated at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. ENIAC’s first programmers were all women who had worked on calculating mathematical formulas for ballistics tables during WWII: Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Jean Bartik, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Meltzer, Fran Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman. Adele Goldstine wrote the first manual for ENIAC, and was instrumental in converting ENIAC from a computer that needed to be reprogrammed each time it was used to one that was able to perform a set of fifty stored instructions. They were not credited until decades later as the pioneers in developing the programming language used to instruct the computer in the tasks it was to perform.
- February 15, 1974 – Miranda July born as Miranda Grossinger, American film director, screenwriter, actress, and author. Wrote, directed, and co-starred in the films Me and You, and Everyone We Know. She is the author of a collection of short stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You, and the novel The First Bad Man.
- February 15, 1982 – Agatha Barbara takes office as Malta’s first woman President.
- February 15, 1995 – Megan Thee Stallion born as Megan Jovon Pete, American freestyling rapper; beginning in 2018, several of her pieces reached the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100. She has been very active in fundraising for several charitable organizations in her hometown of Houston, Texas, including donating and handing out Thanksgiving turkeys at the Houston Food Bank Portwall Pantry to over a thousand households, donating $10,000 to the Bail Relief Effort for Houston Protesters in 2020, donations to a nursing facility during the pandemic, and with Beyonce, raising $2.5 million for Bread of Life to help Houston communities with Covid relief efforts. She also helped fund scholarships for the ‘Don’t Stop’ Scholarship Fund, awarded to women of color pursuing higher education, and in February, 2021, launched Hotties Helping Houston to assist senior citizens and single moms in recovering from losses and damage caused by Winter Storm Uri.
- February 15, 2011 – Representative Carolyn Maloney (Democrat-New York) introduced the Susan B. Anthony Birthday Act, to make Susan B. Anthony’s birthday a U.S. national holiday, but it has never been enacted. California, Florida, New York, and Wisconsin have the day listed on their state calendars, but only Florida has made it a legal holiday. West Virginia marks it on Election Day in February, and Massachusetts celebrates Susan B. Anthony Day each year on August 26, the date in 1920 when the 19th Amendment was ratified, and U.S. women finally won the right to vote; also on August 26, there’s an annual Susan B. Anthony Festival in Rochester New York.
- February 15, 2019 – Thousands of students have walked out of classes to join a UK-wide climate strike amid growing anger at the failure of politicians to tackle the escalating ecological crisis. Organisers said more than 10,000 young people in at least 60 towns and cities from the Scottish Highlands to Cornwall joined the strike, defying threats of detention to voice their frustration at the older generation’s inaction on the environmental impact of climate change. Anna Taylor, age 17, one of the most prominent voices to emerge from the new movement, said the turnout had been overwhelming. “It goes some way to proving that young people aren’t apathetic, we’re passionate, articulate, and we’re ready to continue demonstrating the need for urgent and radical climate action.”
- February 15, 2021 – The World Trade Organization appoints former finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala as its first female and first African leader, handing her the task of restoring trust in a rules-based global trading system. The WTO’s 164 members unanimously selected the development economist to serve a four-year term as director general. Okonjo-Iweala took over the institution, with its budget of $220 million and a staff of 650, at a critical time. After four years of bruising battles between Washington and Beijing over protectionist tariffs and import quotas that badly damaged global trade, Okonjo-Iweala will have to find a way to bridge a growing divide between the administrations running the world’s first and second largest economies. She said her top priority is addressing the coronavirus pandemic, warning of the dangers of “vaccine nationalism.” She said in an interview, “No one is safe until everyone is safe. Vaccine nationalism at this time just will not pay, because the variants are coming. If other countries are not immunized, it will just be a blowback. It’s unconscionable that people will be dying elsewhere, waiting in a queue, when we have the technology.”
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- February 16, 1838 – Kentucky passes a law creating a public school system, and giving single women and widows over age 21 who owned property subject to taxation for the schools the right to vote in elections which decided on taxes and local boards for the new county “common school” system. However, there wasn’t adequate funding for a truly statewide system until 1888.
- February 16, 1870 – Leonora O’Reilly born, labor organizer, founding member of the Woman’s Trade Union League; helped to found the NAACP.
- February 16, 1893 – Katharine Cornell born, American stage actress, writer, theatre owner, and producer, known as the “First Lady of the American Theatre,” she was one of the first winners of the Tony Award, given by the American Theatre Wing; Cornell was among the first inductees into the American Theatre Hall of Fame (established in 1972).
- February 16, 1900 – Mary Elizabeth Switzer born, American public administrator, social reformer, and advocate for increasing government’s role in assisting people with disabilities; worked on the Vocational Rehabilitation Act of 1954, a major expansion of federal funding and services for the physically and mentally disabled, which also authorized grants to fund research and rehabilitation programs.
- February 16, 1905 – Dame Henrietta Barnett born, British WRAF officer and director; she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service as a volunteer in 1938, then transferred to the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) when it was established in June, 1939. She was commissioned as a company assistant (equivalent to a pilot officer in the Royal Air Force), with seniority from December 1938. During World War II, she served at RAF Upper Heyford in Oxfordshire, at RAF Feltwell in Norfolk, and at the Air Ministry in London during the Blitz. At the end of WWII, she was posted to RAF Mediterranean Command in Italy, serving as staff officer responsible for all WAAF personnel in the RAF Mediterranean and Middle East Command. In 1947, she became a flight officer, and served as the WAAF staff officer at Flying Training Command headquarters. In 1949, when the Women’s Royal Air Force (WRAF) was created, she was made a group officer in its Secretary Branch, one of the two WRAF Deputy-Directors. In 1952, she became Commanding Officer of RAF Hawkinge, the only woman station commander in the RAF, then served as Director of the WRAF as air commandant (1956-1960).
- February 16, 1905 – Louise Leung Larson born, first Chinese American and first Asian American reporter to work on a mainstream daily paper The Los Angeles Record (1926), later worked for Chicago Daily Times and Los Angeles Times. She received many awards for her work. Her memoir, Sweet Bamboo, was published in 1989.
- February 16, 1906 – Vera Menchik born, Russian-Czechoslovak-British chess player; the first, and longest reigning, Women’s World Chess Champion, from 1927 to 1944.
- February 16, 1920 – Anna Mae Hays born, chief of the Army Nurse Corps (1967-1971); on June 11, 1970, she was one of the first two women promoted to the rank of Brigadier General (same day as Elizabeth Hoisington).
- February 16, 1923 – Bessie Smith makes her first recording, “Down Hearted Blues” which sells 800,000 copies for Columbia Records.
- February 16, 1932 – Gretchen Wyler born as Gretchen Wienecke, American actress, dancer, animal rights activist, and founder of the Genesis Awards for animal protection. She appeared in several Broadway musicals, including Silk Stockings, Damn Yankees, and Bye Bye Birdie, as well as making frequent guest star appearances on television series from the 1970s through the 1990s. Wyler, who was the first woman to serve on the board of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, started the Ark Trust in 1991 to present the Genesis Awards to productions and members of the news and entertainment fields whose outstanding work has raised awareness of animal protection issues. The awards are now given annually by the U.S. Humane Society. Wyler died at age 75 from complications of breast cancer in 2007. After her death, a Genesis Award given to an individual was named the Gretchen Wyler Award in her honor.
- February 16, 1945 – The first state or territorial anti-discrimination law in the United States in the 20th century, known as the Alaska Equal Rights Act of 1945, had passed in the House of the Territorial Legislature, and was now under consideration by the Senate. Juneau territorial senator Allen Shattuck derided the bill, saying, "Who are these people, barely out of savagery, who want to associate with us whites, with 5,000 years of recorded civilization behind us?" Tlingit nation member Elizabeth Peratrovich, Grand President of the Alaska Native Sisterhood, rose and opened her speech, “I would not have expected that I, who am barely out of savagery, would have to remind gentlemen with five thousand years of recorded civilization behind them, of our Bill of Rights.” In her impassioned two hour speech, she talked about herself, her friends, her children, and the cruel treatment that consigned Alaska Natives to a second-class existence. She described to the Senate what it means to be unable to buy a house in a decent neighborhood because Natives aren't allowed to live there. She described how children feel when they are refused entrance into movie theaters, or see signs in shop windows that read "No dogs or Natives allowed." The Senate passed the House Bill, voting 11-5 in favor, and it was signed into law on February 16, 1945, by Territorial Governor Ernest Gruening. In 1988, the Alaska State Legislature established February 16 as ‘Elizabeth Peratrovich Day.’
- February 16, 1953 – Roberta Williams born, American video game designer and co-founder of Sierra Entertainment; her first game, Mystery House, released in 1980, is credited as the first graphic adventure game. She went on to develop the very successful King’s Quest series, the first video game series to be created and maintained by a woman designer.
- February 16, 1958 – Natalie Angier born, American nonfiction writer, New York Times science journalist and outspoken atheist; won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting. Her books include Natural Obsessions, about cancer research, The Beauty of the Beastly, about the invertebrate creatures most humans find unappealing, and Woman: An Intimate Geography, a celebration of the female body and biology.
- February 16, 1978 – Tia Hellebaut born, Belgian chemist who was a track and field athlete, who won a gold medal for the High Jump at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and a gold medal at the 2008 Valencia World Indoor Championships for the Pentathlon. She was awarded the Belgium Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the Crown in 2009.
- February 16, 2012 – Thandi Sibisi, South African daughter of farmers in the Zulu heartland, remembers arriving in the big city for the first time. "The bus dropped me in Gandhi Square in Johannesburg. I was 17 and had never even seen a double-storey building in my life. I looked around and it was like, 'I'm going to own this city'," she said. On this day, eight years later, she opened Sibisi, the first major art gallery owned by a black woman in South Africa. She reflected, "Growing up, I would never have thought I'd be exposed to so many opportunities ... Of course it's [South Africa] dominated by white people, if it's 2012 and this is only the second black-owned gallery being opened. But I think there's room for change: people know this new gallery is coming up and are receiving it in a positive way ... I’ve always been the diva in the family who wanted to do everything.”
- February 16, 2016 – UN Assistant Secretary-General and UN Women Deputy Executive Director Lakshmi Puri spoke at “The Value of Hosting Mega Sport Events as a Social, Economic and Environmental Sustainable Development Tool” event, saying: “Sport has enormous power to generate real social, economic and environmental change and contribute to sustainable development, social cohesion and even to challenge mind sets and prejudice.”
- February 16, 2020 – In the UK, a high court judge intervened to compel the Home Office to house a sex trafficking victim, who was about turned out onto the street, homeless. The 22-year-old was allegedly sexually abused while in foster care. Her complex physical and mental health issues have led to multiple suicide attempts. As a teenager, she fell under the control of county lines drug gangs, which target vulnerable kids, sexually exploiting them, and turning them into drug mules and petty criminals. In June 2019, she was identified as a potential victim of trafficking by the Home Office. She should have been provided with safe accommodation and mental health support, yet the office failed to find her somewhere safe to stay. She was re-trafficked by criminal gangs and was again forced into prostitution. One month later, she was found walking along a motorway in distress by police, and was admitted to a mental health facility as an in-patient. When she was deemed fit enough to be discharged, the hospital and her lawyers wrote to the Home Office asking for safe housing, but despite repeated appeals, she was left at the hospital for a further two months. In January 2020, the Home Office replied to the hospital, saying the woman’s complex mental health needs made her a danger to herself and others and that there were no appropriate safe-house places available. Hours before she was due to be discharged on to the street, a high court judge forced the Home Office to act, and 24-hour support was found. “The failure to provide our client with the specialist support and accommodation to which she was legally entitled has had devastating consequences, including her having been repeatedly re-trafficked, sexually assaulted and financially exploited,” said Rachael Davis, a solicitor at Duncan Lewis. “Our client was recognised as a victim of modern slavery as long ago as June 2019, yet she was not provided with a safe place to live until January 2020 – and only once we had obtained a court order compelling the secretary of state for the home department to do so. It is wholly unacceptable to refuse to provide specialist support and accommodation to a victim of modern slavery because their needs are too complex. Ultimately these are the people who need it the most.”
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- February 17, 624 – Wu Zetian born, concubine of Chinese Tang dynasty Emperor Taizong until his death. She married his son and successor, Emperor Gaozong in 655, becoming his huanghou (empress consort). When Gaozong suffered a debilitating stroke in 660, Wu Zetian became administrator of the court, and then Empress regnant (690-705). She was forced to abdicate after a successful coup in February, 705. Wu Zeitan is the only woman in Chinese history to wear the yellow robes as monarch, which had been reserved for the sole use of emperors.
- February 17, 1848 – Louisa Lawson born, Australian writer, women’s rights activist; took over as publisher of radical pro-federation newspaper The Republican and later launched The Dawn, Australia’s first journal produced by an all-woman staff; leading figure in the Australian woman suffrage movement, ‘The Mother of Suffrage in New South Wales.’
- February 17, 1858 – Margaret Warner Morley born, American biologist, educator, and writer, author of many works for children on nature and biology. Teaching children led her to developing better methods of teaching science, and to writing textbooks noted for being clear, authoritative, and entertaining. Many of them were used as school texts just as nature study was being incorporated into the growing number of schools’ curricula. The Insect Folk, The Honey-Makers, and The Spark of Life: the story of how living things come into the world are among her many titles.
- February 17, 1877 – Isabelle Eberhardt born, Swiss explorer and author; as a teenager, she wrote short stories which were published under a male pen name; she traveled extensively in North Africa, often wearing male clothing for the freedom it allowed her, and converted to Islam, adopting the name Si Mahmoud Saadi, which made her an outcast among the Europeans living in the region. Her acceptance by the Islamic order, the Qadiriyya, convinced the French administration that she was either an agitator or a spy. She survived an assassination attempt shortly thereafter. In 1901, the French administration ordered her to leave Algeria, but she was allowed to return the following year after marrying her partner, the Algerian soldier Slimane Ehnni. Following her return, Eberhardt wrote for a newspaper published by Victor Barrucand and worked for General Hubert Lyautey. In 1904, at the age of 27, she died in a flash flood in the desert.
- February 17, 1877 – Isidora Sekulić born, Serbian author, novelist, essayist, polyglot, adventurer, and extensive traveler. She is considered Serbia’s first woman academic, and known for strong female characters in her fiction. She died at age 81 in 1958.
- February 17, 1879 – Dorothy Canfield Fisher born, author, education reformer, and social activist, who brought the Montessori Method to U.S. She was a strong supporter of women’s rights, racial equality, and lifelong education, and set up a very early adult ongoing education program. She did war-relief work in 1917 in France, establishing the Bidart Home for Children for refugees and organizing an effort to print books in Braille for blinded combat veterans. In 1919, she was appointed to the State Board of Education of Vermont to help improve rural public education. She spent years promoting education and rehabilitation/reform in prisons, especially women's prisons, and headed the U.S. committee that led to the pardoning of conscientious objectors in 1921. She wrote children’s books, as well as fiction and non-fiction for adults, including Understood Betsy; The Home-Maker; Bonfire; and A Fair World for All.
- February 17, 1881 – Mary Carson Breckinridge born, American nurse-midwife; she founded the Frontier Nursing Service, a group of nurse-midwives who provided care to rural people in remote areas of the mountains in Kentucky, often traveling on horse or mule back. She also founded Appalachian family care centers. These services dramatically reduced infant and maternal mortality in Appalachia.
- February 17, 1888 – Dorothy Kenyon born, American attorney, feminist, and civil liberties activist; in 1950, accused of communist affiliations by Senator McCarthy, she called him “an unmitigated liar” and “a coward to take shelter in the cloak of Congressional immunity” then responded, “I am not, and never have been, a supporter of, a member of, or a sympathizer with any organization known to me to be, or suspected by me, of being controlled or dominated by Communists.” A NY Times editorial and support from Eleanor Roosevelt and other respected public figures made McCarthy back off, and the charges were dismissed; Kenyon also served on the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (1946-1950).
- February 17, 1897 – Alice McLellan Birney and Phoebe Apperson Hearst hold the first convocation of the National Organization of Mothers (now the Parent Teacher Association – the PTA), and 2,000 people attend.
- February 17, 1905 – Rózsa Politzer Péter born, Hungarian mathematician, called the ‘founding mother of recursion theory’ because her research papers helped found recursive function theory as a distinct and separate area of mathematical research; responsible for formulating the Ackerman-Péter function.
- February 17, 1911 – Margaret St. Clair born, American pioneering woman writer in science fiction; also used the pen names Idris Seabright and Wilton Hazzard; noted for her short stories "The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles" and "Brightness Falls from the Air."
- February 17, 1912 – Andre Norton born as Alice Mary Norton, used “Andre” as a more salable pen name in science fiction and fantasy, and 50 years later was named as the “Grand Dame of Science and Fantasy.” She was the first woman inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.
- February 17, 1913 – The Armory Show opens in New York, a landmark exhibit displaying works of artists who are to become some of the most influential painters of the early 20th century. Only three women are prominently mentioned in the 50th Anniversary catalog: Mary Cassatt, Marie Laurencin and Marguerite Zorach, but a surprising number of other women artists are in the list of exhibitors: Florence Howell Barkley, Bessie Marsh Brewer, Fannie Miller Brown, Edith Woodman Burroughs, Émilie Charmy, Nessa Cohen, Kate Cory, Edith Dimock (under Mrs. William Glackens), Katherine S. Dreier, Aileen King Dresser, Florence Dreyfous, Abastenia St. Leger Eberle, Florence Esté, Lily Everett, Mary Foote, Anne Goldthwaite, Edith Haworth, Margaret Hoard, Margaret Wendell Huntington, Gwen John, Grace Mott Johnson, Edith L. King, Hermine E. Kleinert, Amy Londoner, Jacquelin Marval, Carolyn Mase, Kathleen McEnery, Charlotte Meltzer, Myra Musselmann-Carr, Ethel Myers, Helen J. Niles, Olga Oppenheimer, Marjorie Organ (under Mrs. Robert Henri), Josephine Paddock, Agnes Lawrence Pelton, Louise Pope, Mary Wilson Preston, Katherine Rhoades, Mary Rogers, Frances Simpson Stevens, Bessie Potter Vonnoh, Hilda Ward, and Enid Yandell.
- February 17, 1918 – Jacqueline Lelong-Ferrand born, French mathematician noted for work on conformal representation theory, potential theory, and Riemannian manifolds; she proved the compactness of the group of conformal mappings of a non-spherical compact Riemannian manifold, resolving a conjecture of André Lichnerowicz.
- February 17, 1920 – Annie Castor Glenn born, American advocate for people with disabilities and communication disorders; she stuttered throughout her life, and didn’t find a treatment that helped her until 1973; she and astronaut John Glenn were married for 73 years until his death in 2016. She served on the Board of the Columbus Speech and Hearing Center, the Advisory Board of the National Center for Survivors of Child Abuse, and the National Deafness and other Communication Disorders Advisory Board of the National Institutes of Health.
- February 17, 1938 – Mary Frances Berry born, American historian, lawyer, and civil rights activist; first black woman to head a major research university as chancellor of the University of Colorado’s Boulder campus in 1976; Jimmy Carter appointed her to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 1980: when Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981, he tried to fire Berry and dismantle the commission, but she sued the Reagan Administration successfully in federal court to retain her seat.
- February 17, 1945 – Zina Bethune born, American actress, dancer, and choreographer; she was diagnosed with scoliosis and hip dysplasia as a girl, and worked throughout her life with disabled students. She founded Dance Outreach in 1982 (now known as Infinite Dreams) which enrolls disabled children in dance-related activities, and the Bethune Theatredanse in 1981, a multimedia performance company. In 2012, she was killed at age 67 in a hit-and-run accident as she was trying to help an injured possum in Griffith Park, Los Angeles.
- February 17, 1946 – Shahrnush Parsipur born, Iranian novelist, translator, short story writer, and children’s author; best-known for her novella, Zanan bedun-e Mardan (Women Without Men), and her novel Touba va Ma'na-ye Shab (Touba and the Meaning of Night). Women Without Men was banned by the Iranian government a few years after its publication, and she was pressured to stop writing on such themes. Touba and the Meaning of Night was written after she spent over four years in prison and, like most of her other works, is still banned in Iran. She has been living outside her homeland since 1994.
- February 17, 1952 – Karin Büttner-Janz born, German physician, orthopaedic specialist, and former East German Olympic gymnast who won two gold medals at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich; physician at the orthopedic clinic of Berlin-Hellersdorf (1990-2004); chief physician at the Vivantes clinic of Berlin-Friedrichshain (2004-2012) From 2008 to 2012, she was additionally Chief Physician of the Vivantes clinic in Berlin-Kreuzberg.
- February 17, 1962 – Alison Hargreaves born, British mountaineer; scaled Mount Everest solo, without supplementary oxygen or a Sherpa team in 1995; she soloed all the great north faces of the Alps in a single season, including the Eiger’s north face, a first for any climber. She was killed in 1995 while descending from the summit of K2.
- February 17, 1991 – Bonnie Wright born, English actress, director, and activist; best known for playing Ginny Weasley in the Harry Potter movies. She founded her own production company, BonBonLumiere, which produces short films. Her first project as a director was Separate We Come, Separate We Go in 2012, which was shown at the Cannes Film Festival. She has since directed Know Thyself; Sextant; Phone Calls, a three-part series; and Medusa’s Ankles. She is an environmental activist, and serves as an ambassador for Greenpeace and Lumos, the children’s charity started by J.K. Rowling.
- February 17, 2019 – Raya al-Hassan became one of four women to take cabinet jobs in the new Lebanese government, a record for the country, and three more than in the last government, in which even the Minister for Women was a man. “There are a lot of female interior and defence ministers in the world and they have proved their efficiency,” Hassan said. “It might be a new phenomenon for Lebanon and Arab countries, but hopefully it will be repeated and not be unique.” al-Hassan had served as Minister for Finance (2009-2011), then served as Minister for Interior and Municipalities until 2020. The three other women in the 30-strong cabinet were in charge of energy, administrative development, and the economic empowerment of women and young people. Though Lebanon is widely held to be liberal by regional standards, some of its laws continue to uphold a patriarchal social code. Much of Lebanon’s civil law, including marriage, divorce, and inheritance, is based on religious law, which often treats women differently from men. “Lebanon is a male-dominated society and though women reached very important positions, when we talk about politics, especially parliament and government, their presence was modest,” said the women and youth minister, Violette Safadi. “I think we broke this barrier.”
- February 17, 2021 – In the UK, feminist groups have warned the government that a campaign to honour more than 1,700 war heroes with statues will further exacerbate the gender imbalance of the UK’s civic statues. Within the Conservative Party, the ‘Common Sense’ Group of MPs, which was launched in the summer of 2020, has proposed that every recipient of the Victoria Cross and George Cross be immortalised with a statue in their place of birth. Just 11 of the 1,761 holders of these honours are women. The UK is estimated to have just 25 public statues of women who were not queens or princesses. Terri Bell-Halliwell, founder of InVisiblewomen, a virtual museum and national campaign for gender equality in UK civic statues, said in a letter to Sir John Hayes, chair of the Common Sense Group, “The best estimate of the number of UK statues of named non-royal men was 500 at last count in 2016, while named non-royal women numbered just 25. Given this astonishing existing imbalance, I was shocked by the proposal of the Common Sense Group concerning the erection of statues to all holders of both the Victoria and George Cross.” She said there are a number of active campaigns for statues of women, including the suffragettes Mary Jane Clarke, Amy Walmsley and Sylvia Pankhurst, the palaeontologist Mary Anning, the MP Barbara Castle, the author Virginia Woolf, and the Matchgirls, the working-class women and girls who became pioneers in the unionist movement by campaigning for better conditions at their London matchmaking factory. “If the public purse is really to be used for new statues surely it is these women who should have first call on such funding? Even if every one of them had a statue, we would still not have come close to gender equality in who we look up to on civic plinths, but at least it would be a step in the right direction. Coming from a government that has so often stated its backing for gender equality this idea seems wholly retrograde.”
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- February 18, 1642 – Marie Champmeslé born, “La Champmeslé” was the leading French actress in tragic roles in the latter half of the 17th century. The French playwright Jean Racine wrote a number of his finest tragedies for her. She and her husband, actor and playwright Charles Chevillet Champmeslé, joined the Théâtre Guénégaud in 1670, which merged with the Molière-Marais company into the legendary Comédie-Française in 1680. Among the many notable roles which she inaugurated, she portrayed Iphigénie twice, in Iphigénie en Aulide, and again in Oreste et Pylade. Because of failing health, Champmeslé left the stage in 1698, and died in May that year at the age of 56.
- February 18, 1851 – Ida Husted Harper born, American suffragist, author, journalist, lecturer, and educator. She attended Indiana University, but left without graduating to take a position as a high school principal and teacher. In 1871, she married Thomas Harper, a lawyer, but she pursued a new career as a columnist for the Terre Haute Saturday Evening Mail, in spite of her husband’s objections – she was able to divorce him in 1890 at the age of 39 under Indiana’s somewhat more liberal divorce laws. Harper wrote columns on women’s issues which appeared in a number of U.S. newspapers, and her opinions grew more “radical” over time, especially after she met Susan B. Anthony in 1878. She handled press relations for a women's suffrage amendment in California, headed the National American Woman Suffrage Association's national press bureau in New York City, and the editorial correspondence department of the Leslie Bureau of Suffrage Education in Washington, D.C., and chaired the press committee of the International Council of Women. Harper also wrote a three-volume biography of Susan B. Anthony, at Anthony’s request, and collaborated with Anthony on volume four of the six-volume History of Woman Suffrage. She wrote volumes five and six of the history to complete the project after Anthony's death in 1906. In 1931, she suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, and died at the age of 80 in Washington DC.
- February 18, 1918 – Jane Loevinger born, American psychologist, pioneer in ego development theory, and in the study of women’s psychological issues.
- February 18, 1921 – Mary Amdur born, American toxicologist and public health researcher who worked primarily on the effects of smog, beginning with the air inversion in the mill town of Donora in Pennsylvania, which killed 20 people and sickened 7,000 others; her findings led to her being threatened, the loss of her funding, and being fired from her job at the Harvard School of Public Health in 1953; she carried on her research in a different role at Harvard, and later at MIT and New York University; she was vindicated when her studies became the basis for the first standards in air pollution monitoring, which led to the 1970 Clean Air Act, giving the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) the power to effectively fight environmental pollution.
- February 18, 1922 – Helen Gurley Brown born, author, publisher, and editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine (1965-1997), which she transformed into a magazine for single, career-oriented women.
- February 18, 1922 – Connie Wisniewski born, American baseball player (1944-1952), starting pitcher and outfielder in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, considered one of the best players in the league.
- February 18, 1929 – Janet Gaynor is awarded the first Oscar for Best Actress at the inaugural Academy Awards in Hollywood, California, for her performances in Sunrise, 7th Heaven, and Street Angel, the only time an actress won for multiple roles.
- February 18, 1930 – Pauline Bart born as Pauline Bernice Lackow, American feminist sociologist and professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago who studied gender inequality, violence against women, and women's development. Her doctoral thesis, later published as the book Portnoy's Mother's Complaint, concerned depression in middle-aged women, traditional homemakers, and mothers, but now divorced by their husbands, with none of the skills needed to enter the job market. Bart's later research focused on the causes of rape and the means by which women are able to avoid being raped. A study she published in 1986 found that women who fight a rapist, using verbal or physical resistance, are less likely to be raped. She also studied the ways gender biases propagated inequalities and harmed women. In a study in 1973, she studied language in gynecology textbooks and pointed out how the books of that time focused not on women's reproductive health, but instead focused on male partners' happiness. She attributed this to lack of gender diversity among gynecologists of the time, who were over 90% male. She critiqued language used in gynecology textbooks of that period which taught that a woman's sexual pleasure was secondary to that of her husband, and that she should yield to his sex drive. Professor Jane M. Ussher, reviewing Bart's work in 2003 noted that, despite the "critical feminist gaze" Bart had aimed at gynecology textbooks, little had changed in the 30 years since the study's publication. In 1992, Bart became a tenured professor in the psychiatry department at University of Illinois College of Medicine. She also taught in the women's studies and sociology departments for over 20 years but was let go by the College of Arts and Sciences when a student alleged that she had discriminated against him and said he "fit the profile of a male black rapist." Bart denied that she said this. She died at age 91 of Alzheimer’s disease in 2021.
- February 18, 1931 – Toni Morrison born, American author, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize in Literature, and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom; noted for Beloved, Song of Solomon, and The Bluest Eye. Her books are noted for chronicling the Black American experience and addressing the harsh consequences of racism in the U.S. She died at age 88 in 2019.
- February 18, 1934 – Audre Lorde born, American writer, poet, civil rights activist, feminist, lesbian, publisher, and librarian. She was born in New York City, the daughter of a father from Barbados, and a mother from Grenada. Her poems and prose largely deal with issues related to civil rights, women, and the exploration of black female identity. “I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified, because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We’ve been taught that silence would save us, but it won’t.” Her first poem was published in Seventeen magazine when she was still in high school. She became an associate of the Women’s Institute for Freedom of the Press in 1977, and a co-founder of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1980. She survived breast cancer in 1978, but died at age 58 of liver cancer in 1992.
- February 18, 1941 – Irma Thomas born, American singer-songwriter, known as “The Soul Queen of New Orleans.” In 2007, she won the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Blues Album for After the Rain, and was inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame for her contributions to Louisiana music.
- February 18, 1950 – Nana Amba Eyiaba I born, appointed in 1982 as one of the Ghanaian queen mothers, for Effutu 16 of the Effutu Municipal District, a traditional position responsible for maintaining local cultural traditions and providing care for women and children in her area. In 2001, after a national women’s conference held by the University of Ghana, she was a key leader in a group of queen mothers who developed the national Council of Women Traditional Leaders (CWTL), which eventually grew to include women leaders who were not queen mothers. Eyiaba served on the CWTL executive Council from 2001 to 2016, advocating for more participation of women leaders in national politics. In 2013, the national Minister of Chieftaincy opened their regional and national meetings of Houses of Chiefs to queen mothers, but they were excluded from voting rights. CWTL began the fight for queen mothers’ full representation in 2016. Eyiaba worked for the Ghana Education Service of the Ministry of Education from 1997 until 2009, rising to become Director of Education for the Central Region before her retirement. Member of the Electoral Commission of Ghana from 2004 to 2010.
- February 18, 1955 – Lisa See born in Paris, American writer, novelist, and public speaker, noted for her novels which explore her Chinese-American heritage, including On Gold Mountain; Snow Flower and the Secret Fan; and Peony in Love.
- February 18, 1960 – Greta Scacchi born, Italian-Australian actress, best known for her roles in the films Heat and Dust, White Mischief, Presumed Innocent, and the 1996 film version of Emma. She holds dual Italian and Australian citizenship. Scacchi is an active supporter of campaigns and organisations that promote environmental causes, including Greenpeace and Christian Aid's climate change campaign. In 2009, she posed nude with a codfish to promote the documentary The End of the Line, a film exposing the effects of overfishing. She continues to lead the linked Fishlove campaign, in which well-known actors pose for photographs with a variety of fish.
- February 18, 1974 – Carrie Ann Baade born, American contemporary surrealist painter and associate professor in Florida State University’s Department of Art. In 2007, she was one of three artists who became the first Americans ever to exhibit at the Ningbo Museum, one of the largest provincial museums in China, located outside of Shanghai. The Ningbo Museum director called them "the Mayflowers" for their contributions as cultural ambassadors. She is also a co-author of Cute and Creepy.
- February 18, 1974 – Ruby Dhalla born, Canadian Liberal politician; Member of Parliament for Brampton-Springdale (2004-2011); she and British Columbia Conservative MP Nina Grewal became the first Sikh women to serve in the Canadian House of Commons.
- February 18, 1974 – Julia “Butterfly” Hill born, American environmental activist; she lived in a 1500-year-old California redwood tree for 738 days (1997-1999) to prevent Pacific Lumber Company loggers from cutting it down; author of The Legacy of Luna, and co-author of One Makes the Difference.
- February 18, 1974 – Leilani Münte born, stock car racing driver (2010-2018), and environmental activist; became an Ambassador for the National Wildlife Federation in 2008, and has been an advocate for solar and wind power. Münte has also volunteered for Save Japan Dolphins, protesting against the annual slaughter of the Taiji dolphins, since 2010.
- February 18, 1975 – Bernadette Sembrano-Aguinaldo born, Filipina newscaster, investigative reporter, and television host; known for her investigative work on The Correspondents, and as co-anchor of the weekday evening news for ABS-CBN news. In 2011, she was diagnosed with Bell’s palsy, and continues to undergo therapy.
- February 18, 2018 – The STEM Gap: though their numbers are growing, only 34% of the U.S. STEM workforce are women. Meanwhile, in Algeria, 41% of college graduates in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics are women. There is evidence that a number of nations that have traditionally less gender equality have more women in science and technology than their more gender-progressive counterparts do. According to a new paper published in Psychological Science by the psychologists Gijsbert Stoet, at Leeds Beckett University, and David Geary, at the University of Missouri, it could have to do with the fact that women in countries with higher gender inequality are simply seeking the clearest possible path to financial freedom. And often, that path leads through STEM professions. The issue doesn’t appear to be girls’ aptitude for STEM professions. In looking at test scores across 67 countries and regions, Stoet and Geary found that girls performed about as well or better than boys did on science in most countries, and in almost all countries, girls would have been capable of college-level science and math classes if they had enrolled in them. But when it comes to their relative strengths, in almost all the countries—all except Romania and Lebanon— boys’ best subject was science, and girls’ was reading. (That is, even if an average girl was as good as an average boy at science, she was still likely to be even better at reading.) Across all countries, 24 percent of girls had science as their best subject, 25 percent of girls’ strength was math, and 51 percent excelled in reading. For boys, the percentages were 38 for science, 42 for math, and 20 for reading. And the more gender-equal the country, as measured by the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index, the larger this gap between boys and girls in having science as their best subject. In this study, the percentage of girls who did excel in science or math was still larger than the number of women who were graduating with STEM degrees.
- February 18, 2020 – Mücella Yapıcı is a Turkish architect and a representative of Taksim Solidarity Platform, which was established in 2012 during the legal battle against building projects that threatened Taksim Square and the Taksim Gezi Park, one of the last green spaces in Istanbul. Yapıcı became one of the defendants in the never-ending Gezi Park Case, in which where 26 rights defenders stood trial, charged in 2014 with “founding and controlling a criminal organization” and “violating the law on assemblies and demonstrations.” All 26 defendants were acquitted on all charges in 2015. But in 2019, 16 of the original defendants, including Yapıcı, were indicted again. She was accused this time of organizing a coup attempt. In other words, protecting the green spaces and trees of the city was the equivalent of trying to overthrow the government. The penalty for this is aggravated life imprisonment. There were hearings December 24-25, 2019, on January 28, 2020, and on February 6, 2020. On February 18, 2020, the Istanbul 30th Heavy Penal Court again acquitted Mücella Yapıcı and all the other defendants. But almost a year later, on January 22, 2021, the 3rd Criminal Chamber of the Istanbul Regional Court of Justice lifted the acquittal decisions. The Chamber ordered that the case file be sent to the court of first instance for “re-examination and judgment.” Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the UN, the European Union, and the U.S. have all criticized the police brutality during the protests. Police deployed huge amounts of tear gas, and made widespread use of water cannons, which caused injuries to thousands of protesters in Istanbul and other Turkish cities. They even tear gassed the Divan Istanbul Hotel, and the Taksim German Hospital, and arrested nearly two dozen lawyers making a statement to the press at the Istanbul Çağlayan Justice Palace. The subsequent trials and re-trials of the representatives of the Taksim Solidarity Platform have also been harshly criticized by human rights organizations and the international community. The only law in Turkey which seems to faintly resemble our double jeopardy clause (in the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment) applies exclusiviely to Turkish citizens who were previously prosecuted by a foreign court.
- February 18, 2021 – NASA’s Perseverance rover landed successfully in Mars. A key member of the team is Swati Mohan, the lead of the guidance and controls operations, which act as the “eyes and ears” for the rover. Her family moved to the U.S. from India when she was just a year old. At mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, Mohan announced, "Touchdown confirmed. Perseverance safely on the surface of Mars, ready to begin seeking the signs of past life."
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- February 19, 1841 – Elfrida Andrée born, Swedish organist, composer, and conductor, noted for two organ symphonies, and other works for orchestra and piano; she was also active in the Swedish women’s movement.
- February 19, 1866 – Mary Anderson born, American real estate developer, rancher, citrus grower, and inventor of the first effective windshield wiper blade, for which she was granted a patent in November 1903.
- February 19, 1871 – Lugenia Burns Hope born, American social reformer and founder of the Neighborhood Union, the first woman-run social welfare agency for African Americans in Atlanta, Georgia. The Neighborhood Union became internationally known as a model for community building.
- February 19, 1877 – Gabriele Münter born, German expressionist painter; founding member of Der Blaue Reiter, a short-lived but influential group of Russian émigrés and native Germans which also included Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc.
- February 19, 1902 – Kay Boyle born, writer, political activist; she spent much of her young adulthood in Paris, leaving just as the Germans were invading during WWII; was blacklisted during the McCarthy era; then her involvement in anti-Vietnam War demonstrations got her fired from her university position, and led to a jail sentence in Oakland, CA; her short stories “The White Horses of Vienna” and “Defeat” won O. Henry Awards.
- February 19, 1946 – Karen Silkwood born, American chemical technician and labor union activist; her job was making plutonium pellets for nuclear reactor fuel rods. She was the first woman at the Kerr-McGee Cimarron Fuel Fabrication Site to be part of the union’s negotiating team, speaking about the health and safety of workers. In 1974, she testified before the Atomic Energy Commission. After discovering plutonium contamination on her person and in her home for three days, she was driving to a meeting with a New York Times reporter when she was killed in a car crash under suspicious circumstances. When her family sued Kerr-McGee, it turned into the longest trial up to that point in Oklahoma history. Kerr-McGee settled out of court for $1.38 million USD, but without admitting liability.
- February 19, 1949 – Danielle Bunten Berry born as Daniel Paul Bunten, American game designer and programmer, noted for the 1984 game The Seven Cities of Gold; in 1998, honored with a Lifetime Achievement award by the Computer Game Developers Association.
- February 19, 1950 – Bebe Moore Campbell born, African American novelist, non-fiction writer, and journalist; Singing in the Comeback Choir, What You Owe Me, and Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine, which won a 1992 NAACP Image Award for Literature. She died at age 56 in November 2006. Campbell had been diagnosed with brain cancer in February 2006.
- February 19, 1952 – Amy Tan born, American novelist, essayist, and short story writer; best known for her novel, The Joy Luck Club.
- February 19, 1953 – Cristina Fernández de Kirchner born, Argentinian lawyer and Justicialist (social democrat) politician; Member of the Senate of Argentina for Buenos Aires since 2017 (and previously 2005-2007); she was the second woman President of Argentina (2007-2015), and has now been Vice President of Argentina since December 2019.
- February 19, 1963 – The publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique reawakens the Feminist Movement in the United States as women’s organizations and consciousness raising groups spread.
- February 19, 1966 – Justine Bateman born, American writer, director, producer, and actress; founder of FM78.tv, a digital production company, producing shorts, including Easy to Assemble and Five Minutes, which she also wrote and directed.
- February 19, 1993 – Victoria Justice born, American actress and singer; she began acting at age 10; known for playing Lola Martinez on the TV series Zoey 101 (2005-2008). In 2010, she joined Girl Up, a campaign sponsored by the United Nations Foundation, which gives American girls the opportunity to help raise funds for 600 million girls living in developing countries who need clean water, health services, and the opportunity for an education. One in seven of these girls will be forced by poverty or societal pressure to marry before they are 15 years old. Justice said in an interview, "I'm so excited to become a Champion for Girl Up and to help make a difference for girls who aren't given the same opportunities that most of us take for granted. I know that there are plenty of girls throughout the country who are just like me—ready and motivated to stand up for the rights and well-being of girls in the developing world. I am confident that, together, we will rise to the challenge."
- February 19, 2004 – Millie Bobby Brown born, British actress and producer, known for playing Eleven in the Netflix science fiction series Stranger Things since 2016. In 2018, Brown was appointed as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador – the youngest person to be selected by UNICEF. She has been bullied, harassed, and sexualized on social media since age 14.
- February 19, 2007 – New Jersey becomes the third U.S. state to offer civil unions to same-sex couples.
- February 19, 2017 – Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said the ride-hailing company would conduct an "urgent investigation" into sexual harassment accusations made by a former employee in a blog post. The former Uber software programmer, Susan Fowler, said that her manager propositioned her in chat messages. She said she took screenshots of the messages and showed them to human resources, but was told that her boss was a "high performer" and senior managers didn't want to punish him for something they saw as an "innocent mistake." Travis Kalanick would resign as CEO under pressure from top investors in June of 2017, as fallout over allegations and lawsuits concerning sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and a toxic work environment at Uber continued. He remained on the Board of Directors.
- February 19, 2017 – Vet Girls Rock Day is launched to raise awareness of the many contributions of women veterans to the U.S. military.
- February 19, 2020 – In Nevada, six candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination participated in the contentious debate. Senator Elizabeth Warren took on the most recently announced candidate, billionaire and former Mayor of New York City Mike Bloomberg, “I’d like to talk about who we’re running against: a billionaire who calls women fat broads and horse-faced lesbians. And no, I’m not talking about Donald Trump; I’m talking about Mayor Bloomberg. Democrats are not going to win if we have a nominee who has a history of hiding his tax returns, of harassing women and of supporting racist policies like redlining and stop-and-frisk.” The end of the debate was interrupted by Erika Andiola and Lucia Allain of the Texas-based immigrants’ rights group RAICES, who shouted at Joe Biden, “You deported 3 million people!” in a reference to the record pace of deportations during the Obama administration. They chanted “No kids in cages!” and “Don’t look away!” as they were escorted from the auditorium. Erika Andiola told reporters, “We decided to interrupt. We’re not sorry. The immigration debate today — immigration became the last issue that they talked about, and they didn’t even have time to talk about the issue. This is not OK. We are being the most attacked by the Trump administration, and we deserve a conversation about how our lives are going to look like if any of those people get elected.”
- February 19, 2021 – In India, when the pandemic hit, tens of thousands of Indian women were suddenly out of work. The Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), a membership-based organization that seeks to improve the lives and livelihoods of women who work in the informal sector, including seamstresses, artisans, vendors, and small and marginal farmers, had already been training women in digital skills so they can market their products online, and accept digital payments for purchases. “Our Leelawati project proved timely,” explained Reema Nanavaty, SEWA’s director. “When we first launched it, traditional occupations were being buffeted by globalization, liberalization and other economic changes. Little did we realize how useful the training would become during the pandemic.” SEWA’s network reached deep into the countryside, and linked members through videoconferences, gaining a better understanding of problems at the grassroots, and helped member groups to meet virtually using cellphones. When families in one rural area were having difficulties accessing basic groceries, SEWA coordinated with an agro-produce supply chain to provide them with essentials at fair prices.
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- February 20, 1784 – Judith, Lady Montefiore, born Judith Barent Cohen, British linguist, musician, author, travel writer, and philanthropist. Her father was a wealthy Ashkenazi Jew. At the time, marriages between Jews of Sephardim and Ashkenazim heritage were not approved, but Sir Moses Montefiore, from an Italian-Jewish family, was a British financier and banker, who thought this caste prejudice was hurtful to Judaism. Both the bride and groom were 28 years old when they married. It was a partnership which lasted 50 years, as Lady Montefiore traveled with her husband on all his foreign missions up to 1859, when her declining health made it impossible for her to continue. It was Lady Montefiore who directed the administration of most of their philanthropic endeavors, and her linguistic abilities were a great asset on their many journeys. She published two of her travel journals anonymously. The Jewish Manual, which contains recipes, social advice, and historical information, was also published anonymously in 1846 (Chaim Raphael edited a new edition which was issued under her name in 1983). In September, 1862, three months after celebrating their golden wedding anniversary, she died in her sleep. Sir Moses founded the Judith Lady Montefiore College in her memory. It became a Sephardic seminary for training young men as rabbis and teachers of religion. Shrinking enrollment caused the college to close its doors in the 1980s, but it was re-opened in 2005 as a college to promote advanced Torah study.
- February 20, 1805 – Angelina Grimké Weld born, American abolitionist, suffragist, and political activist; with her sister Sarah, the only known white Southern women to take active part in the abolitionist movement; her essays and speeches were incisive arguments for ending slavery and advancing women’s rights. In 1836, after Weld published her pamphlet, An Appeal to Christian Women of the South, urging southern women to join the antislavery movement, leaders in South Carolina threatened Grimké Weld with imprisonment if she ever returned to the state. She and her sister became the first women agents of William Lloyd Garrison’s American Antislavery Society in 1837. Grimké Weld was also the first woman to address the Massachusetts State Legislature in February 1828, bringing a petition signed by 20,000 women seeking to end slavery.
- February 20, 1875 – Marie Marvingt born, French athlete, mountaineer, aviator, journalist, and advocate for aeromedical evacuation. She won numerous prizes for her sporting achievements in swimming, cycling, mountain climbing, winter sports, ballooning, flying, riding, gymnastics, athletics, rifle shooting, and fencing. She was the first woman to climb many of the peaks in the French and Swiss Alps. Marvingt was a record-breaking balloonist, an aviator, and during World War I became one of the first women combat pilots. She was also a qualified surgical nurse, and the first trained and certified flight nurse in the world. In 1903, M. Château de Thierry de Beaumanoir dubbed her “the Fiancée of Danger,” which newspapers used to describe her for the rest of her life. She proposed the development of fixed-wing aircraft as air ambulances to the French government as early as 1910, and worked for establishment of air ambulance services throughout the world. With the help of Deperdussin company engineer Louis Béchereau (who designed the SPAD fighter), she drew up the prototype for the first practical air ambulance. She raised money to purchase air ambulances for the French military and the Red Cross, which she ordered in 1912, but the company went bankrupt before delivery. Marvingt gave over 3,000 conferences and seminars on the subject on at least four continents. She was co-founder of the French organization Les Amies De L'Aviation Sanitaire (Friends of Medical Aviation) and was also one of the organizers behind the success of the First International Congress on Medical Aviation in 1929. Her book Ma Traversée de la Mer du Nord en Ballon (My Crossing of the North Sea in a Balloon) won first prize in 1949 in an international literary competition sponsored by the Women's Aeronautical Association of Los Angeles, and she was honored in 1957 with the Médaille d'Argent du Service de Santé de l'Air (Air Force Medical Service's silver medal). She died in 1963 at the age of 88.
- February 20, 1893 – Elizabeth Holloway Marston born, American psychologist, attorney, and author; co-developer of the systolic blood-pressure test used to detect deception (predecessor of the polygraph), and one of the inspirations for her husband William Moulton Marston’s comic book character, Wonder Woman.
- February 20, 1893 – Gabrielle Petit born, Belgian Red Cross volunteer and spy for the British Secret Service during WWI; she was arrested by the German military and executed by firing squad.
- February 20, 1902 – Katharine Way born, pioneer in developing techniques for the retrieval, evaluation, and dissemination of information on nuclear structure; she earned a Ph.D. in nuclear theory at University of North Carolina (1938); co-developer of the Way-Wigner formula for fission produced decay; worked for National Bureau of Standards (1947-1968); her concern for the health of retirees led to Durham Seniors for Better Health in the City of Medicine.
- February 20, 1903 – Aniela Jaffé born, Swiss psychoanalyst and author; worked with Carl Jung. She was the author of several books, including The Myth of Meaning, and Parapsychology, Individuation, Nazism. She also recorded and edited Jung’s semi-autobiographical book Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Some experts believe that Jung wrote only the first three chapters, and it was Jaffé who actually wrote most of the rest of the book, from recordings and her notes on conversations with Jung.
- February 20, 1926 – Dame Gillian Lynne born, British ballerina, choreographer, and theatre-television director; choreographer for Cats and The Phantom of the Opera.
- February 20, 1928 – Jean Kennedy Smith born, American diplomat, U.S. Ambassador to Ireland (1993-1998), made an honorary citizen of Ireland in 1998 in recognition of her aid in the Northern Ireland peace process; founder of Very Special Arts; received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011.
- February 20, 1935 – Caroline Mikkelsen, Danish explorer; on this day at age 29, she became the first woman to stand on an Antarctic island, five miles off the coast of Antarctica, while with her husband on a Norwegian expedition.
- February 20, 1937 – Nancy Wilson born, versatile African American singer whose career spanned over five decades; she won Grammy Awards in 2005 and 2007 for Best Jazz Vocal Album, and a Grammy in 1965 for Best Rhythm & Blues Recording. She received an award from the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in 1993, the NAACP Image Award/Hall of Fame Award in 1998, and was inducted into the Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame in 1999. Co-founder of the Nancy Wilson Foundation, which exposes inner-city children to the country. In 2005, Wilson was honored as a Civil Rights activist, and inducted into the International Civil Rights Walk of Fame at the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site. She said, "This award means more to me than anything else I have ever received."
- February 20, 1941 – Buffy Sainte-Marie born, Canadian-American Cree singer-songwriter, producer, and social activist, founder of the Cradleboard Teaching Project.
- February 20, 1963 – Mariliza Xenogiannakopoulou born, Greek lawyer and politician, member of the Syriza party (radical left/progressive alliance); Member of Greek Parliament (2007-2012); Minister for Health and Social Solidarity (2009-2010): Member of the European Parliament (2004-2007).
- February 20, 1971 – Calpernia Addams born, American author, performer, and activist for transgender fights; co-founder of Deep Stealth Productions in Hollywood.
- February 20, 1988 – Rihanna born Robyn Rihanna Fenty, R&B singer-songwriter from Barbados. She has sold more than 20 million albums, and has a Billboard record for youngest solo artist with eleven #1 singles. Noted for her studio album, Rated R, recorded after she was assaulted during an argument with her boyfriend at the time, Chris Brown, who was charged and found guilty of assault and making criminal threats. The songs for Rated R have notably darker lyrical themes. In 2006, she started Believe Foundation to help terminally ill children, and has staged a number of fundraising concerts for the foundation; contributed fashion designs to the 2008 H&M Fashion Against AIDS project, and was one of the stars who helped raise $100 million USD for cancer research during the “Stand Up to Cancer” television special. In 2012, she honored her grandparents by launching the Clara - Lionel Foundation, which funded the Clara Braithwaite Center for Oncology and Nuclear Medicine at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Barbados, hosts an annual Diamond Ball fundraiser, and funds emergency response and relief efforts for national disasters, especially hurricanes in the Caribbean. The foundation is assisting in retrofitting homes to better resist disaster damage, and, in partnership with International Planned Parenthood Federation and Engineers Without Borders, to make reproductive health clinics in the Caribbean more resilient to disasters. She also gave $100,000 to the food bank for victims of Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
- February 20, 2003 – Olivia Rodrigo born, American singer-songwriter and actress; best known for playing Nini in the Disney TV series High School Musical: The Musical: The Series since the show premiered in 2019, and for her songs “Drivers License,” “Deju Vu,” and “Good 4U.” She is an institute speaker and panelist for the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. Since July, 2021, she has made videos promoting the importance of young people getting vaccinated, part of a White House outreach initiative.
- February 20, 2021 – In an interview about the book, Bring Back Our Girls, released in March 2021, a chronicle of the struggles of the Nigerian girls who were kidnapped and held hostage, co-author Joe Parkinson said, “We wanted to tell the story of how these women survived, but also the story of why it took so long to free them in spite of, or perhaps because of, the social media campaign … Twitter generated outrage … but not the actual means to free anybody.” The book is based on hundreds of interviews with the students, family members, former militants, officials, spies, and others involved in their ordeal. The resistance, led by Chibok student Naomi Adamu, began three months after the young women were taken from their school dormitory by Islamist militants and hidden in the depths of a forest. It would end in direct confrontation and disobedience, and an unlikely victory which saved their lives. The story of the extraordinary courage of the women held for up to three years by Boko Haram in north-eastern Nigeria has never been fully told, despite the massive global attention focused on their abduction in April 2014.
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- February 21, 1397 – Isabella of Portugal born, Duchess consort of Burgundy. At age 30, she was still unmarried, but Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, had been widowed twice, was still without an heir, and wanted a wife who would help advance his plans for an alliance with England. Isabella was also highly intelligent, shrewd, and accomplished. After protracted negotiations, they were married by proxy in 1420, but Isabella was further delayed by the assembly of a fleet to take her, her 2000-member retinue, and her extensive trousseau, to Burgundy. The fleet was beset by storms, several ships were lost with all aboard, along with most of her trousseau, but Isabella survived, and at age 33, was finally formally married in January 1430. Her first pregnancies resulted in two sons who died in infancy, but her third son, Charles the Bold, was born healthy in 1433. Isabella acted as regent of the Burgundian Low Countries during the absence of her husband in 1432 and in 1441-1443. She served as her husband's representative in negotiations with England regarding trade relations in 1439, and also with the rebellious cities of Holland in 1444. She was a generous patron of the arts, and attracted many artists and poets to the court, but also wielded political influence with both her husband and her son. She handled the negotiations for several marriages of members of the court, including the marriage of her son to Catherine of France. In 1457, she withdrew from the court because of the increasing disputes between her son and his father, and her desire for a quiet and more devout life. Her separate court at La Motte-au Bois became a refuge for courtiers caught in the crossfire of Philip’s shifting alliances with England and France while he was trying to improve his powerbase. Isabella died at the then advanced of age 74 in 1471.
- February 21, 1846 – Sarah G Bagley, the first recorded woman telegrapher, becomes superintendent of the Lowell, Massachusetts, telegraph office. After she was first hired, she had discovered she was being paid one-third less than the man she replaced. Bagley was also the organizer and president of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association, and an advocate for a 10-hour workday for mill workers.
- February 21, 1855 – Alice Freeman Palmer born, American educator who was the co-founder in 1881 (and first president) of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, which by 1884 had grown into a national organization and was renamed the American Association of University Women (AAUW). She was president of Wellesley College from 1881 until 1887, when she resigned to get married. She became a nationally known public speaker, advocating for opening college education to women, using her image as a “respected, financially independent, successful academic woman” to advance the idea of a ‘New Woman.’ She was later Dean of Women at the newly founded University of Chicago (1892-1895), where she doubled the percentage of the woman students at the school from 24% to 48%, which resulted in a backlash, mainly from male faculty members. Discouraged by the faculty and staff's response, she resigned in 1895, and resumed her career on the lecture circuit. She died in Paris in 1902, at age 47, of a heart attack, after emergency surgery to remove a bowel obstruction.
- February 21, 1866 – Lucy B. Hobbs is the first woman to graduate from dental school, the Ohio College of Dental Surgery in Cincinnati. She later became more active in politics, campaigning for greater women's rights, until her death in 1910 at age 77.
- February 21, 1888 – Clemence Dane born as Winifred Ashton, English novelist and playwright; her first novel, Regiment of Women, was a semi-veiled treatment of lesbian relationships; also noted for A Bill of Divorcement, Third Person Singular, and Enter Sir John, coauthored with Helen Simpson.
- February 21, 1903 – Anaïs Nin born in France of Cuban parents, diarist, essayist, novelist, and writer of short stories and erotica. She began 69 volumes of journals with a letter to her father; noted for the novels Delta of Venus and Little Birds.
- February 21, 1909 – Helen Octavia Dickens born, daughter of a former slave, and the first African-American woman to be admitted to the American College of Surgeons. She was a doctor, professor of obstetrics and gynecology, and an associate dean of medicine. At Crane Junior College, she sat at the front of her classes, to avoid the racist comments and gestures aimed at her by fellow students. She earned a B.S. from the University of Illinois College of Medicine in 1932, and her M.D. in 1934. She was one of two women in her class and was the only African-American woman in her class. After her residency at Chicago’s Provident Hospital, she worked at the Aspiranto Health Home in North Philadelphia for 7 years, then spent a year at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. She passed the board examinations and became the first female African American board-certified Ob/Gyn in Philadelphia. In 1943, Dickens was accepted into a residency at Harlem Hospital in New York City. She finished her residency in 1946, and was certified by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in the same year. In 1948, she became director of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Philadelphia’s racially segregated Mercy Douglass hospital, where she remained until 1967. After leaving Mercy Douglass, she opened a clinic at the University of Pennsylvania for teen parents, offering group counseling, therapy, education, and prenatal care. Dickens also became dean of admissions (1967-1972), increasing the number of minority students at UPenn from three to 64.
- February 21, 1911 – Madeleine Victorine Bayard born, Frenchwoman who served as First Officer “Madeleine Barclay” aboard HMS Fidelity on agent-running operations into Vichy France, as an agent of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) during World War II. Before the fall of France, she was serving on the large French merchant vessel Le Rhin. In 1940, the ship escaped to Britain, was accepted for service with SOE, recommissioned as HMS Fidelity, and her French crew inducted into the Royal Navy under pseudonyms to protect their families in occupied Europe. “Barclay” went through the WRNS (Women’s Royal Naval Service) Officers' Training Course at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, in January 1941, before rejoining her ship. At the time, it was extremely rare for a ‘Wren’ to serve afloat. By November 1942, the Nazis were occupying Vichy France, and Fidelity was reassigned to join a convoy being sent South-East Asia. But off the Azores, the ship was sunk by German U-Boats while trying to rescue survivors of other ships in the convoy which has already been sunk. One of Fidelity’s Motor Torpedo Boats reached safety, but all hands aboard Fidelity were lost.
- February 21, 1914 – Jean Frances Tatlock born, American physician and psychiatrist; a member of the Communist Party who wrote for their publication, Western Worker; when she began a relationship with physicist Robert Oppenheimer in 1936, her Communist associations brought her under surveillance by the FBI and her phone was tapped; stress and clinical depression led to her suicide in January, 1944.
- February 21, 1915 – Claudia Cumberbatch Jones born in Trinidad, came to the U.S. as a child, American author, Communist and black nationalist; wrote a column called “Half the World,” for the Daily Worker; when deported from the U.S. in 1955, she moved to the UK, and founded Britain’s first major black newspaper, The West Indian Gazette, in 1958; noted for “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!”
- February 21, 1924 – Thelma Estrin born, American computer scientist and engineer, pioneer in expert systems and biomedical engineering, applying computer technology to medical research and healthcare; IEEE Centennial Medal (1984).
- February 21, 1924 – Dorothy Blum born, American cryptanalyst and computer scientist who worked for the National Security Agency (NSA) and its predecessors from 1944 to 1980, becoming the first woman in the NSA’s management hierarchy in 1972, as chief of NSA Computer Operations.
- February 21, 1927 – Erma Bombeck born, humorist and columnist, began writing obituaries and columns on gardening, eventually wrote books of humor. She publicly supported the Equal Rights Amendment. Bombeck appeared on “Good Morning America” television show for eleven years.
- February 21, 1933 – Nina Simone born, iconic singer, songwriter, arranger, and civil rights activist. She studied at Juilliard, and then studied piano with Vladimir Sokoloff. Her musical style fused gospel and pop with classical music, in particular Johann Sebastian Bach, and accompanied expressive, jazz-like singing in her contralto voice. Her song, "Mississippi Goddam," in response to Medgar Evers’ murder and the Birmingham Alabama church bombing that killed 4 pre-teen black girls and blinded a 5th, was boycotted in parts of the South.
- February 21, 1936 – Barbara Jordan born, American lawyer, civil rights leader, and Democratic politician; because of segregation, she was not allowed to be a student at the University of Texas at Austin, so she attended Texas Southern University, an historically-black institution, majoring in political science and history. At Texas Southern, Jordan was a national champion debater, defeating opponents from Yale and Brown and tying Harvard University. She graduated magna cum laude in 1956. After unsuccessfully running for a seat in the Texas State House of Representatives, she was elected to the Texas State Senate in 1966, becoming the first African-American state senator since 1883 and the first black woman to serve in that body (1967-1973). She then was the first African-American woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives (1973-1978) from a Southern state. President Lyndon Johnson used a bit of his influence to see that she served on the House Judiciary Committee, where she memorably participated in the Nixon impeachment hearings over the Watergate scandal: “My faith in the Constitution is whole; it is complete; it is total. And I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction, of the Constitution.” By 1975, Speaker of the House Carl Albert had appointed her to the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee. In 1976, Jordan became the first woman to deliver a keynote address at a Democratic National Convention. In the U.S. House, she sponsored expanding coverage of the Voting Rights Act, and voted to impeach Richard Nixon. In all, she sponsored or co-sponsored over 300 bills, many of which became laws. Jordan retired from politics in 1979, and taught ethics for 17 years as an adjunct professor in the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, ironically at the University of Texas at Austin, where segregation had kept her from being a student. Jordan was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1990. She was again a keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention in 1992. In 1994, President Clinton awarded Jordan the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the NAACP presented her with the Spingarn Medal. She suffered from leukemia, but died from pneumonia complications in January, 1996, at the age of 59. President Bill Clinton revealed he had wanted to nominate her to the U.S. Supreme Court, but by the time the opportunity arose, her health was already in decline.
- February 21, 1942 – Margarethe von Trotta born, German film director, a notable member of the New German Cinema movement, considered Germany’s foremost postwar woman director; her Sister films, Sisters, or The Balance of Happiness (Schwestern oder die Balance des Glücks), Marianne and Juliane (Die Bleierne Zeit), and Three Sisters (Paura e amore) established her career.
- February 21, 1947 – Olympia Snowe (Republican-Maine), served in the U.S. House (1979-1995) and the Senate (1995-2013); centrist Republican, health care access and abortion rights advocate; she cited extreme partisanship causing Congressional dysfunction as a primary reason why she retired; now co-chair of the Bipartisan Policy Center Commission on Political Reform.
- February 21, 1950 – Sahle-Work Zewde born, Ethiopian career diplomat; President of Ethiopia since 2018; the first woman to hold the office, she was elected unanimously by the Federal Parliamentary Assembly. Previously, she was Under Secretary-General, Head of the United Nations Office to the African Union (1918), and Director-General of the United Nations Office at Nairobi (2011-2018). She was the second Ethiopian woman to serve as an ambassador, appointed to embassies in France, Tunisia and Morocco, Djibouti, and Senegal, as well as serving as her country’s Permanent Representative to the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) and as Permanent Representative to UNESCO.
- February 21, 1967 – Sari Essayah born, Finnish Christian Democratic politician; member of the European Parliament (2009-2014); party secretary for the Christian Democrats (2007-2009); Member of the Finnish Parliament (2003-2007 and current member since 2015). Former race walker who won the 1993 World Championship, and the 1994 European Championship, as well as holding seven Finnish national records.
- February 21, 1983 – Mélanie Laurent born, French film and stage actress, filmmaker, screenwriter, singer, and pianist. Her first role was in the 1999 film, The Bridge, when she was 16. She made her Hollywood debut in 2009 in Inglourious Basterds. Laurent made her directorial and screenwriting debut with the short film De moins en moins (Less and Less). She then made her first appearance on the French stage in 2010. Laurent directed the feature films The Adopted, which she co-wrote, and Respire, which was screened at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. Laurent co-directed the documentary, Tomorrow, with Cyril Dion, which won the 2015 César Award for Best Documentary Film from France’s Académie des Arts et Techniques du Cinéma. Tomorrow showcases initiatives in ten countries around the world which are concrete examples of solutions to 21st century environmental and social challenges.
- February 21, 1986 – Charlotte Church born as Charlotte Reed, Welsh singer-songwriter, actress, television presenter, activist against sexism and Greenpeace supporter. She is also an advocate for Welsh independence from the UK, and campaigned for Jeremy Corbin in the Labour Party leadership election. Her first album, Voice of an Angel, released in 1998, made her the youngest artist to have a #1 album on the British classical crossover charts. In 2001, she sang the end title song for the film A Beautiful Mind, and also sang other vocal passages throughout the score. She is Patron of the charity the Topsy Foundation, which raises awareness and funds to support rural communities in South Africa, empowering people infected with and affected by HIV and AIDS, through medical care, social support, and skills development. Church released an autobiography titled Voice of an Angel (My Life So Far) in October 2000, and a second autobiography titled Keep Smiling in late 2007. She has also written several opinion pieces for the Guardian newspaper. The Charlotte Church Show (2006-2008) on Channel 4, featured a weekly “theme tune,” and comedy sketches with guest celebrities. In January 2017, she took part in a protest in Cardiff over Donald Trump's inauguration as US president.
- February 21, 2017 – A federal judge temporarily blocked Texas from cutting off Medicaid money to Planned Parenthood over secretly recorded videos released by anti-abortion activists in 2015. The activists claimed that the videos showed Planned Parenthood officials trying to illegally profit from the sale of fetal tissue, but U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks of Austin said that Texas health authorities had not presented “even a scintilla of evidence” to justify punishing Planned Parenthood and denying Medicaid patients the right to go to the group’s 34 health centers in Texas.
- February 21, 2021 – UN Secretary General António Guterres, writing in an opinion piece for the Guardian newspaper, said the world is facing a “pandemic of human rights abuses ... The virus has thrived because poverty, discrimination, the destruction of our natural environment and other human rights failures have created enormous fragilities in our societies. The lives of hundreds of millions of families have been turned upside down – with lost jobs, crushing debt and steep falls in income. Frontline workers, people with disabilities, older people, women, girls and minorities have been especially hard hit. In a matter of months, progress on gender equality has been set back decades. Most essential frontline workers are women, and in many countries are often from racially and ethnically marginalised groups. Most of the increased burden of care in the home is taken on by women. Violence against women and girls in all forms has rocketed, from online abuse to domestic violence, trafficking, sexual exploitation and child marriage. The latest moral outrage is the failure to ensure equity in vaccination efforts. Just 10 countries have administered more than 75% of all Covid-19 vaccines. Meanwhile, more than 130 countries have not received a single dose. If the virus is allowed to spread like wildfire in parts of the global south, it will mutate again and again. New variants could become more transmissible, more deadly and potentially threaten the effectiveness of current vaccines and diagnostics … The virus is also infecting political and civil rights, and further shrinking civic space. Using the pandemic as a pretext, authorities in some countries have deployed heavy-handed security responses and emergency measures to crush dissent, criminalise basic freedoms, silence independent reporting and restrict the activities of nongovernmental organisations. Human rights defenders, journalists, lawyers, political activists – even medical professionals – have been detained, prosecuted and subjected to intimidation and surveillance for criticising government responses to the pandemic. Pandemic-related restrictions have been used to subvert electoral processes and weaken opposition voices ... This is not a time to neglect human rights … We are all in this together. The virus threatens everyone. Human rights uplift everyone. By respecting human rights in this time of crisis, we will build more effective and equitable solutions for the emergency of today and the recovery for tomorrow.”
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- February 22, 1822 – Isabella Beecher Hooker born, suffragist, lecturer: wrote and presented to the Connecticut General Assembly a bill in 1870
that gave married women property rights, each year until the bill finally passed in 1877.
- February 22, 1860 – Mary Washington Bacheler born, the daughter of Baptist missionaries who served in India. In 189o, after completing her medical degree at the Women’s Medical College in New York, she became the first woman medical missionary of the Free Baptist Woman’s Missionary Society, and rejoined her parents in West Bengal. She spoke the Bengali and Odia languages fluently, taught school, and provided medical care for women who would not see a male doctor for religious reasons. Bacheler retired in 1933, and left India in 1936. She died in 1939 at age 79 in Newton, Massachusetts.
- February 22, 1876 – Zitkala-Sa (Red Bird) born, also known as Gertrude Bonnin, writer, editor, musician, teacher, and Sioux Indian activist of the Yankton Dakota. In 1913, she wrote the libretto and lyrics for the first American Indian opera, The Sun Dance Opera. She was co-founder of the National Council of American Indians in 1926, a group which lobbied for U.S. citizenship and civil rights for Indians, and served as NCAM’s first President (1926-1938).
- February 22, 1892 – Edna St. Vincent Millay born, American poet, playwright, and feminist; in 1923, she was the third woman to win Pulitzer Poetry Prize for The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver and Other Poems. She also wrote prose pieces under the pen name Nancy Boyd to pay the bills. In 1943, she was the second woman to be awarded the Robert Frost Medal for “distinguished lifetime service to American poetry.”
- February 22, 1892 – Thillaiaadi Valliammai born, South African Tamil activist, worked with Gandhi during protests in South Africa; she fell ill soon after being sentenced to three months hard labor and refused early release, then died soon after serving her sentence.
- February 22, 1900 – Meridel LeSueur born, poet, short fiction writer, activist, and essayist on unfair labor conditions and land rights of Southwest and Minnesota Native American tribes. After studying dance and physical fitness, in the early 1920s she moved to New York City. She studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Acting, and lived in an anarchist commune. By 1925, she was a member of the Communist Party. She found work in Hollywood as an extra and a stunt woman in silent pictures, but also continued to write articles for newspapers and journals, and children’s books which became popular, including biographies like Nancy Hanks of Wilderness Road, and Sparrow Hawk. She was blacklisted in the 1950s as a communist, and taught writing classes in her mother’s home. In the 1960s, she travelled the U.S., attending and writing about the student protests, and in the 1970s, she lived among the Navajo people in Arizona. Her work was discovered by feminists in the 1970s, and enjoyed a revival. Le Sueur’s unpublished novel, The Girl, written in the 1930s, was finally published in 1978. Noted for her memorable 1932 portrait of women during the Great Depression, “Women on the Bread Lines.”
- February 22, 1906 – Willa Brown Chapell born, African American aviator, civil rights activist, and lobbyist; first black woman officer in the U.S Civil Air Patrol; co-founder with Cornelius Coffey of a school of aeronautics, the first private flight training academy owned and operated by African Americans.
- February 22, 1906 – Constance Stokes born, modernist Australian painter; one of only two women artists included in a major traveling exhibition of Australian artists in the 1950s, shown in Canada, the UK, and Italy.
- February 22, 1917 – Jane Bowles born, American playwright and novelist; noted for her novel Two Serious Ladies, and her play In the Summer House.
- February 22, 1926 – World Thinking Day is launched by the Girl Guides and Girl Scouts, as a day of international friendship, speaking out on issues affecting girls and young women, and for fundraising projects.
- February 22, 1933 – Sheila Hancock born, English theatre, television, and radio actress; author of a memoir, The Two of Us, about her marriage to actor John Thaw, and Just Me, her account of coming to terms with widowhood after his death in 2002. In 2014, she published her debut novel, Miss Carter’s War. She read Maya Angelou’s poem “Touched by an Angel” at an ‘I Do to Equal Marriage’ event in 2014 celebrating the legalization of same-sex marriage in England and Wales. She is a Patron of the London HIV charity The Food Chain, and worked with the Kids Company, a charity for disadvantaged children, and youthful ex-offenders.
- February 22, 1937 – Joanna Russ born, American science fiction and fantasy author, feminist essayist, and activist; known for her novels, Picnic on Paradise; The Female Man; and The Zanzibar Cat. Also known for her non-fiction books, How to Suppress Women’s Writing, describing the systematic social forces that stifle widespread recognition of the work of women authors, and To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction.
- February 22, 1943 – Sophie Scholl was a German college student, and a member of the White Rose, a pacifist student resistance group which wrote and distributed leaflets urging Germans to "Support the resistance movement!" in the struggle for "freedom of speech, freedom of religion and protection of the individual citizen from the arbitrary action of criminal dictator-states" directed against the Nazi government. The members of the White Rose were arrested on February 18, 1943, for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets. On February 22, Sophie, her brother Hans, and their friend Christopher Probst were tried for treason. She was recorded as saying, “Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don't dare express themselves as we did.” All three were found guilty of treason, condemned to death, and within hours executed by guillotine.
- February 22, 1966 – Rachel Dratch born, American comedian and writer; part of the improvisational theatre group The Second City in Chicago, and a cast member on the TV show Saturday Night Live (1999-2006); author of Girl Walks Into a Bar: Comedy Calamities, Dating Disasters and a Midlife Miracle.
- February 22, 1967 – Playwright Barbara Garson’s satire MacBird premieres in New York City.
- February 22, 1969 – Barbara Jo Rubin is the first woman jockey to win a U.S. thoroughbred horse race, riding Cohesian in the 9th race at the Charles Town Race Track in West Virginia.
- February 22, 2001 – A U.N. war crimes tribunal convicts three Bosnian Serbs charged with rape and torture, in the first wartime sexual enslavement case to go before an international court. Some of the evidence used in preparation of the indictments issued by the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague was gathered by Serbian human rights campaigner Natasa Kandic.
- February 22, 2017 – The Trump administration rescinded Obama-era anti-discrimination protections for transgender students. Donald Trump overruled Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ concerns about the move. The Obama administration had ordered schools to let transgender students use public school restrooms corresponding to their gender identity, and Democrats immediately criticized Trump for rolling back the policy. “No student should face discrimination at school because of who they are,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Democrat-California) said in a statement. “Transgender students have the same right to a safe environment at school and in their community as everyone else.”
- February 22, 2019 – The Trump administration issued a new rule that excluded abortion providers and abortion referrers from Title X funding, and which re-directed almost all of the family planning program’s $286 million budget to faith-based reproductive health groups. The rule took effect 60 days after it was published in its final form on the federal register. Under the rule, Planned Parenthood, which has served 40% of Title X patients, and all other similar providers, could no longer provide abortions or issue referrals at the same facilities it used for other reproductive services, such as STD and breast cancer screenings. The final rule eliminated Title X’s long-standing requirement that all pregnant patients be offered nondirective pregnancy options counseling, including information about parenting, adoption, and abortion. Eliminating this requirement summarily dismissed the evidence-informed clinical recommendations for providing high-quality family planning care. Since its inception in 1970, Title X had been a bedrock, cost-effective health care program helping ensure that poor and low-income individuals had access to critical family planning care, including a full range of contraceptives, pelvic exams, sexually transmitted disease testing and treatment, and screening for breast and cervical cancer. The National Family Planning & Reproductive Health Association, and Cedar River Clinics, represented by the ACLU, filed a challenge to the changed rule. A separate lawsuit was filed by Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson, who was joined by attorneys general from 22 other states. The American Medical Association also filed a legal challenge. Because of the new rules, the number of clinics receiving Title X funding and the number of patients served by the program dropped precipitously – not only did Planned Parenthood formally withdraw as an organization, but about 25% of Title X sub-recipients and sites have left the Title X network, and six states – Hawaii, Maine, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, and Washington – entirely withdrew from the network. There were split decisions on the lawsuits: the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals held that the regulations are arbitrary and capricious and contrary to law, but the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals allowed the regulations to go into effect. Many provisions in the Trump Administration’s regulation mirror those issued in 1988 by the Reagan Administration. In 1991, the Supreme Court upheld the Reagan regulations in the case, Rust v. Sullivan, but the Reagan provisions were rescinded by President Clinton when he came into office. The Biden administration reversed most of the Trump changes, but women’s healthcare remains a political football.
- February 22, 2020 – In the UK, 44 groups and organizations, and over 800 current and former students signed an open letter from the Cambridge University Students’ Union Women’s Campaign calling for colleges to be stripped of their powers to investigate sexual misconduct complaints against their own members, because of a case at Trinity Hall, Cambridge’s fifth oldest college. Dr. William O’Reilly, the don in charge of student welfare at Trinity, appointed a panel to investigate rape allegations against a male student, then gave evidence to the panel in support of the accused. Three female students told academic staff in February 2018 that they had been raped and sexually assaulted by the male student. He denied the allegations. Two of the women made formal complaints, which were tested at a disciplinary hearing by a panel of dons appointed by O’Reilly, who was Trinity Hall’s acting senior tutor. The panel cleared the student of wrongdoing but raised concerns that another academic, Dr Nicholas Guyatt, had acted inappropriately by helping the women to draft their complaints. Guyatt was placed under investigation, and ultimately cleared, but did not regain his pastoral role. He later chose to resign, and became a fellow at another Cambridge college. Trinity Hall has announced that both O’Reilly and the college’s master, the Reverend Canon Dr. Jeremy Morris, have “voluntarily stepped back from duties” until a separate panel of Cambridge fellows issues a report on what the college should do. The letter’s author, Kate Litman, women’s officer at the students’ union, said: “This case is about more than individual failings. It is about an institution-wide failure to protect survivors and tackle sexual violence. That’s why we believe it’s crucial for colleges to commit to a centralised, independent system for handling cases of sexual misconduct. The Women’s Campaign will continue to hold the University to account for its handling of sexual misconduct, and to call for further reform from the university disciplinary procedure.” By the end of March, 2020, barrister Gemma White QC had been appointed to lead the inquiry, because of her extensive experience and expertise in cases of bullying, harassment, and sexual misconduct, and the inquiries she had led at other education establishments. In May, 2021, White recommended that the college establish a sexual misconduct working group that included student and former student representatives before the publication of her report, to enable the group to launch a cultural survey and build a training programme. At the end of August, 2021, Dr. Jeremy Morris, master of Trinity Hall, resigned, after White recommended the college initiate disciplinary action. Morris resigned, even before White’s report, which was based on over 60 interviews, had been published.
- February 22, 2021 – UNFPA, the United Nation’s sexual and reproductive health agency, appointed Natalia Vodianova, supermodel, philanthropist, and impact investor, as its latest Goodwill Ambassador, as part of a campaign to redefine menstruation as a normal bodily function. “For too long, society’s approach to menstruation and women’s health has been defined by taboo and stigma”, said Ms. Vodianova, stressing that the situation “has undermined the most basic needs and rights of women.” On any given day, more than 800 million women and girls aged 15 to 49 are actively menstruating. In many countries, taboos surrounding the cycle leaves girls vulnerable and can even be life-threatening, says UNFPA, as they are excluded from public life, denied opportunities, sanitation, and basic health needs. A UNFPA press release said issue has been starved of the attention it deserves, but in recent years that has started to change, and “achieving this is central to UNFPA’s mandate.” UNFPA Executive Director Natalia Kanem, underscoring the significance of spotlighting the damage caused, said, “It’s a tragic irony that something as universal as menstruation can make girls feel so isolated…We all have a role to play in breaking the taboos around menstruation.” Kanem added that UNFPA “is pleased to partner with such a powerful and committed advocate. Societies prosper when girls are confident, empowered and making their own decisions!”
- February 22, 2022 – In the UK, during Storm Eunice, an intense storm with wind speeds of up to 122 mph, landing the big passenger airliners at Heathrow Airport was exceedingly difficult. But Captain Ruth Karauri and her First Officer Ayoob Harunany of Kenya Airways made a textbook landing of their big Boeing 787 Dreamliner, which was captured on video and went viral. Karuari had had finished high school when she heard about a Kenya Airways twenty month program to train people with no flying experience to be pilots for the airline. At the end of a long interviewing and testing process, she was one of the fifteen who made the cut out of over 3,000 applicants. Karuari said of the landing at Heathrow, “The flight conditions were strong gusting winds and it was quite a bumpy ride. However, thanks to the training we have had at Kenya Airways, particularly in the simulator, prepared us for such a scenario.
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Sources
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Feminist Cats Learning Black History Online
.
“My cat lived a very rough life before she arrived in my home.
She has one tooth that’s broken and another that’s kind of
long on the other side. She’s snaggletoothed. A stranger
might look at her and say, ‘Oh, she has imperfect teeth.’
But I look at her and see absolute perfection – the
charming perfection – of her imperfection. It gives me so
much information about the kind of life she has had, and
the kind of soul she has probably fashioned.”
– Alice Walker,
first African-American woman to
win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction,
for her novel The Color Purple
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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: