March is National Women’s History Month
The most common characteristic
of women's history is to be lost
and discovered, lost again and
rediscovered, lost once more
and re-rediscovered – a process
of tragic waste and terrible
silences that will continue until
women's stories are a full and
equal part of the human story.
– Gloria Steinem,
feminist leader and
co-founder of Ms. Magazine
and the National Women’s
Political Caucus
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.
WOW2 is a four-times-a-month sister blog
to This Week in the War on Women.
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“Each time a girl opens a book
and finds a womanless history,
she learns she is worth less.”
– Dr. Myra Pollack Sadker,
pioneer in sexual bias research,
and co-author of Sexism in
School and Society
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“We live in a world where sports
have the potential to bridge the
gap between racism, sexism
and discrimination. The 2012
Olympic Games was a great start,
but hopefully what these games
taught us is that if women are
given an opportunity on an equal
playing field, the possibilities
for women are endless.”
– Jackie Joyner-Kersee,
Olympic track & field medalist
in four Olympic Games
between 1988 and 1996
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The purpose of WOW2 is to learn about and honor women of achievement, including many who’ve been ignored or marginalized in most of the history books.
These trailblazers have a lot to teach us about persistence in the face of overwhelming odds. I hope you will find reclaiming our past as much of an inspiration as I do.
WOW2 began as a once-a-month post, then as more and more trailblazing women were added to the lists, it expanded until it became a four-times-a-month post. The lists became so long that I’m switching to posting only a selection of these amazing trailblazers — for those who want to see the glorious and much more complete list of outstanding women for this week, click:
www.dailykos.com/...
THIS WEEK IN THE WAR ON WOMEN
will post shortly, so be sure to go there next, and
catch up on the latest dispatches from the frontlines.
Many, 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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- March 1, 1683 – Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach born, Queen consort of Great Britain and Ireland, and Electress consort of Hanover, married to King George II, noted for her political alliance with leading British minister Robert Walpole, and her major influence over policy, including more freedom of the press and of speech in Parliament, and urging clemency for the Jacobites. She was temporary regent for five months in 1729 while her husband in Hanover, during which she helped defuse a diplomatic crisis over Portuguese seizure of a British ship, and pressed for penal system reform, after an investigation revealed widespread abuses, but was unable to gain any major changes to the outdated system. She was far more intellectual and more widely read than her husband, who often listened to her counsel, and was a notable patron of the arts and letters. Her death widely mourned in the British Isles, by Protestants for her moral example and even by many Jacobites because of her intervention for mercy toward their compatriots. King George II refused to remarry.
- March 1, 1692 – Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba are brought before local magistrates in Salem Village MA, beginning the Salem witch trials.
- March 1, 1781 – Javiera Carrera born, Chilean independence activist; she and her brothers were leaders in the early Chilean struggle for independence, which began in 1810, during the period known as the Patria Vieja (Old Republic). She set up many social organizations to support the nascent government, and is credited with sewing the first national flag. After the Spanish Reconquista of 1814, she went into exile with her brothers, in Argentina, but she was jailed, then imprisoned at a convent in Buenos Aires by pro-San Martin forces. She escaped aboard a Brazilian ship bound for Montevideo, in Uruguay. There she received the news of the executions of her brothers Juan José and Luis in 1818, and of José Miguel in 1821. She returned to Chile in 1824, and worked to get the bodies of her brothers repatriated, finally succeeding in 1828. She then lived quietly in her family’s hacienda, where she died at age 81 in 1862. Carrera is called the “Mother of Chile.”
- March 1, 1864 – Rebecca Lee became the first black woman in the U.S. to earn a medical degree, from the New England Female Medical College (the college merged in 1874 with Boston University’s Medical School).
- March 1, 1868 – Alaska P. Davidson born, American law enforcement officer; in 1922, she was the first woman hired as a special investigator by William J. Burns, the director of the Bureau of Investigation (renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935). She was assigned to the Washington DC field office, with a starting salary of $7 a day, plus $4 when traveling. Burns wanted women agents to work on cases related to the Mann Act, which aimed to combat interstate sex trafficking. She was also involved in a case against another agent who was selling classified Department of Justice information to criminals. But in 1924, when J. Edgar Hoover became acting director of the bureau following the Teapot Dome Scandal, he asked for her resignation, and she resigned in June, 1924. By 1928, the other two women agents, Jessie Duckstein and Lenore Houston, had also been asked to resign. There were no more women agents in the FBI until 1972, after passage of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act.
- March 1, 1890 – Theresa Bernstein-Meyerowitz born in Kraków in what is now Poland, but her family came to America when she was a year old, and she grew up in Philadelphia; American Jewish artist known for her portraits and scenes from daily life, and as the non-fiction author of The Poetic Canvas and Israeli Journal; she was a co-founder in 1916 of the Society of Independent Artists, and a member of the National Association of Women Artists. She died at age 111 in 2002.
- March 1, 1893 – Mercedes de Acosta born, American author, poet, and playwright; women’s rights activist and advocate for vegetarianism; her uncloseted lesbianism was very daring for the times; she had relationships with a number of stars from both Hollywood and Broadway, including Alla Nazimova, Eva Le Gallienne, and Greta Garbo. She was a tireless advocate for women’s rights, studied Hindu mysticism for several years, became a vegetarian, and refused to wear fur coats or any fur on her clothing.
- March 1, 1909 – The University of Minnesota opened the first university-based school of nursing in the U.S. There more over 1100 schools of nursing in America, but all the others were hospital-based. Dr. Richard Olding Beard, a professor of physiology in the University of Minnesota Medical School, recognized the value of nursing and believed in professional education for women. Initially, the school offered a three-year program in which four students were enrolled the first year. Bertha Erdman, the school’s first director (1909-1910), had to retire after developing tuberculosis. In 1910, Louise M. Powell was appointed as director of nurses, and served until 1924. In 1919, a five-year program leading to a baccalaureate degree in nursing began. The shorter non-degree program continued until 1947.
- March 1, 1934 – Joan Hackett born, American stage, film, and television actress; noted for her performances in The Group, Will Penny, and The Last of Sheila; active supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA); she died of ovarian cancer at age 49 – her epitaph reads: “Go Away – I’m Asleep.”
- March 1, 1936 – Monique Bégin born in Italy, but raised in France before emigrating to Montreal at the end of WWII; Canadian politician and academic. In 1967 she became the executive secretary of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, which published its report in 1970. She won election to the House of Commons of Canada as a Liberal candidate in the 1972 election; along with Albanie Morin and Jeanne Sauvé, the first three women elected to the House of Commons from Quebec. She was appointed to the Canadian Cabinet by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau as Minister of National Revenue in 1976, and served as Minister of Health and Welfare, 1977-1979 and 1980-1984, during which the Canada Health Act was enacted. In 1986, she joined the University of Ottawa and Carleton University as the first joint Ottawa-Carleton Chair of Women's Studies. From 1990 to 1997, she was the University of Ottawa's dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences. In 2018, she published her memoir Ladies, Upstairs!: My Life in Politics and After.
- March 1, 1941 – Maaja Ranniku born, Estonian Chess Master; she was twice winner of the Women’s Soviet Championship, in 1963 and 1967. After 1991, she played for Estonia. In 1992, she was on the Estonian Team at the 30th Chess Olympiad in Manila, scoring 6 ½ points out of 11 games played. Her highest rating was 2058.
- March 1, 1945 – Nancy Woodhull born, Managing Editor of USA Today (1975-1990), advocated for women in public and private sector leadership positions; founded “Women, Men and Media,” a research/outreach project with Betty Friedan (1988); a trustee of the Freedom Forum (1990-1996). She died of cancer at age 52 in 1997.
- March 1, 1952 – Jerri Lin Nielson born, American physician; after discovering a breast tumor while working in Antarctica in 1998, she self-administered a biopsy, and later chemotherapy, using supplies that had to be parachuted to her. In spite of weather delays which caused her evacuation to be several weeks later than planned, she survived the ordeal, and co-wrote Ice Bound: A Doctor’s Incredible Story of Survival at the South Pole. But in 2005, the cancer recurred and metastasized, spreading to her brain. She died in 2009 at age 57.
- March 1, 1956 – Dalia Grybauskaitė Lithuanian politician; first woman President of Lithuania, elected in 2009, and re-elected in 2014, the first Lithuanian President reelected for a consecutive second term; previously Minister of Finance and European Commissioner for Financial Programming and the Budget (2004 - 2009).
- March 1, 1978 – Women’s History Week is first observed in Sonoma County, California, begun as a modest proposal by the Education Task Force of the Sonoma County Commission on the Status of Women, for the week leading up to International Women’s Day, March 8th – it inspires Women’s History events all over the country, and grows into National Women’s History Month (see also the 1987 entry).
- March 1, 1983 – Lupita Nyong’o born in Mexico City, of Kenyan parents, Kenyan actress; noted for Twelve Years a Slave, for which she won 2014’s Best Supporting Actress Oscar, and Black Panther; activist for women’s rights, against sexual harassment, for diversity and for prevention of cruelty to animals.
- March 1, 1987 – The U.S. Congress passes a resolution permanently designating March as National Women’s History Month.
- March 1, 2010 – Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN) magazine’s annual survey of schools identified by the National Science Foundation as having spent the most money on chemical research shows that 17% of chemistry faculty members at the top 50 U.S. universities in chemistry research were women in the 2009-2010 academic year, a 1% increase over the 2008-2009 year. Purdue University’s chemistry department, with 15 women members representing 29% of its 52 member facility, had the highest percentage of women. The University of Georgia chemistry department, with only one woman on its 26 member facility, had the lowest proportion of women of the 50 schools surveyed.
- March 1, 2015 – The inaugural Black Women in Jazz & the Arts Day.
- March 1, 2020 – Farhanah Mamoojee, a 28-year-old from east London heard in a documentary on the British Empire a passing mention about the Indian women hired as ayahs to look after the children of English families returning home from British colonial India during the long boat passage, but often abandoned once the boat docked. She was startled to find that she lived close to what had once been a hostel for destitute ayahs. The Ayahs’ Home was established in east London in the 19th century by concerned philanthropists, and two of the buildings in which it was housed still stand in Hackney. Fascinated, she thought, “It can’t just be me. There must be other people who want to learn about this.” Eventually she tracked down Rozina Visram, a retired historian who moved to the UK from Zanzibar in the 1970s and began researching ayahs after she too became intrigued by brief passing mentions of often nameless Indian childcare workers. Visram is the acknowledged authority on the subject. Well over 100 ayahs are thought to have come to Britain annually during India’s years as “the jewel in the crown” of the British Empire. Visram says that though they were extremely isolated and vulnerable, some of them were “Enterprising, adventurous.” Many of them took on anglicized versions of their names, including Minnie Green, an ayah who took her abusive employers to court and won. “But of course we don’t have their voices,” says Visram. “They were working-class, and working-class people always disappear from history because they don’t write things down. And being women, there are also gender issues. So we just don’t know much about their lives.” Farhanah Mamoojee applied to English Heritage for blue plaque recognition of the hostel – her application was shortlisted, and English Heritage announced in February 2022 that the Ayahs’ Home would receive a blue plaque later that year. Her enthusiasm also inspired the Hackney Museum staff to begin their own research into the ayahs’ history to expand the limited material on display at the museum about the Ayahs’ Home. Hackney’s manager Niti Acharya said, “It has presented quite a challenge, because what information is out there?” She began systematically scanning passenger lists and landing cards from the early 20th century for mentions of accompanying ayahs. “Over 95% of those listed are treated almost as possessions of the family they are travelling with – Ayah Smith, Ayah Leggatt,” says Acharya.
- March 1, 2021 – A U.S. intelligence assessment that found Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman was personally involved and approved of the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Khashoggi’s fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, who is a Turkish researcher, called on world leaders: “Starting with the Biden administration, it is vital for all world leaders to ask themselves if they are prepared to shake hands with a person whose culpability for murder has been proven, but not yet punished ... The truth – that was already known – has been revealed one more time, and is now confirmed. Yet this is not enough, since the truth can only be meaningful when it serves justice being achieved.” White House spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, said: “We reserve the right to take any action at a time and manner of our choosing.” But she added the US “has not typically sanctioned government leaders of countries where we have diplomatic relations.” Psaki said that the measures taken against Saudi Arabia were “determined by our national security team to have the intended impact of preventing this from ever happening again.” Agnes Callamard, the UN special rapporteur on summary executions, who led an investigation into Khashoggi’s murder, said the details that had been declassified by the US “appears to be very little indeed and that’s disappointing.” Callamard told a press conference in Geneva: “It is extremely problematic, in my view, if not dangerous, to acknowledge someone’s culpability and then to tell that someone ‘but we won’t do anything, please proceed as if have we have said nothing.’ That to me is an extremely dangerous move on the part of the USA.” A criminal complaint was filed in Germany by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), accusing the Saudi crown prince and other high-ranking Saudi officials of crimes against humanity.
- March 1, 2021 – Ayanna Howard, Ph.D., American roboticist, became dean of the Ohio State University College of Engineering. Previously, she was chair of the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Interactive Computing, and a founder and director of the Human-Automation Systems Lab (HumAnS). She has also worked at NASA, and is the founder and president of Zyrobotics, a company that develops mobile therapy and educational products for children with special needs.
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- March 2, 1831 – Metta Fuller Victor born, American author; also used pen name Seeley Regester; pioneer of the “dime novel” and one of the first American writers of detective stories.
- March 2, 1846 – Marie Rôze born as Maria Ponsin, French operatic soprano who made her debut at age 16 at the Opéra-Comique, but soon began appearing at the Paris Opéra. Bizet wrote the opera Carmen with Marie Rôze in mind, but she initially refused to create the character because she felt Carmen was too indecent, but was later persuaded, and it became one of her most notable roles. She spent much of her career touring in the UK. In 1890, Rôze set up a music school and taught singing in Paris. She made her farewell tour in 1894. Marie Rôze received multiple medals for her actions during the WWI German invasion of France. At her passing, the French government ordered a bust of Marie Rôze in the title role of the Victor Massé opera Galatea to be erected over her tomb at the Père Lachaise Cemetery.
- March 2, 1860 – Susanna M. Salter born, first American woman elected as a mayor, of the town of Argonia in Kansas, and an activist in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. In 1887, her name was put on the ballot by a group of men who were against women entering politics, expecting her to be soundly defeated, which they believed would discourage women from running for office. The ballot was not made public before election day, so she didn’t even know her name was on it until the polls opened. When she agreed to serve if elected, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union abandoned the candidate they had been supporting and voted en masse for Salter, and the local Republican Party also voted for her, so she was elected by a two-thirds majority. The New York Sun sent a reporter to cover a city council meeting over which she presided, and even newspapers in Sweden and South Africa carried the story. The pay for the office of mayor was a token $1 per year. Salter was the mother of the first baby born in Argonne, and eight more children, one of whom died in infancy during her term of office. She declined to run for reelection. Salter lived to be 101 years old.
- March 2, 1873 – Inez Haynes Irwin born, American feminist author and journalist who also published work as Inez Haynes Gillmore; member of the National Women’s Party; president of the Author’s Guild (1931–1933); author of over 40 books; noted for Angel Island, an early feminist science fiction/fantasy novel first published in 1914, reprinted in 1978, and in 1988 with an introduction by Ursula K. Le Guin.
- March 2, 1880 – Gillette Hayden born, pioneering woman dentist and periodontist; in 1902, She was the third woman to graduate from the Ohio Medical University(now Ohio State University College of Dentistry.) She was the co-founder with Grace Rogers Spalding of the American Academy of Periodontology in 1914, and served as its first woman president in 1916. She was also active as a suffragist, affiliated with the National Women’s Party.
- March 2, 1887 – Elizabeth Morrissy born, economist, women’s rights activist, trade union supporter, public school and college educator; one of the first women to earn a PhD in political economy from Johns Hopkins University (1930). She concentrated on labor issues like unemployment insurance in American Trade Unions, and stressed the need for women’s involvement in social issues. She taught history and economics at Notre Dame (1920-1963). In 1954, she was a member of the Baltimore School Board, and cast a critical vote that resulted in that city’s school district being the first in the country to desegregate.
- March 2, 1888 – “Big Annie” Clemenc born as Anna Klobuchar; founded and served as president of the local Women’s Auxiliary No. 15 of the Western Federation of Miners, and was an active participant in the Copper Country Strike of 1913-1914. Clemenc frequently led marches in support of the miners wearing a plain gingham dress and carrying a large American flag on a ten-foot pole. In 1914, she went on a lecture tour of the Midwest to raise funds and encourage workers to unionize. She had been largely forgotten and unrecognized until her story was rediscovered in the 1970s. She was inducted into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame in 1996, and is one of the three women shown on the Hall of Fame’s medallion.
- March 2, 1901 – Grete Hermann born, German mathematician and philosopher; noted for her early work on the foundations of quantum mechanics and her critique of a no-hidden-variable theorem by John von Neumann, which was ignored until 1966, when John S. Bell made almost the same argument. Hermann, a member of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) which Hitler had banned in 1933, left Germany in 1936, going first to Denmark, then to France, and finally to London, where she made a marriage of convenience with a man named Edward Henry in 1938, in order to avoid standing out as a German national. In 1940, her prescience was justified when the British government invoked Regulation 18B of the Defence Regulations of 1939, identifying as enemy aliens thousands of refugees who had fled Germany because of politics or racial heritage, and putting them in internment camps. After WWII ended in 1945, she returned to Germany, and rejoined the SDP, contributing to the Godesberger Programm, the party’s revamping of its orientation and goals from ending capitalism to reforming it, rejecting Marxist class struggle and materialism theories, seeking to expand beyond its trade unionist origins. Hermann became a professor of philosophy and physics at Pädagogische Hochschule in Bremen (University of Education at Bremen), and presided over Philosophisch-Politische Akademie (The Philosophical-Political Academy, a non-profit education and social justice advocacy association) from 1961 to 1978.
- March 2, 1903 – The Martha Washington Hotel opens in New York City in the borough of Manhattan, with 416 rooms; the first hotel exclusively for women. Poet Sara Teasdale stayed at the hotel during her visits to New York from 1913 until the 1930s. In 1907, the hotel also became the headquarters of the Interurban Women’s Suffrage Council, founded by Carrie Chapman Catt.
- March 2, 1922 – Frances Spence born, a pioneer in computer programming; one of the original programmers for the ENIAC, the first digital computer; inducted with other ENIAC “computers” into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame in 1997.
- March 2, 1948 – Carmen Lawrence born, Australian psychologist and Labor politician; elected to the Parliament of Western Australia in 1986, and became a government minister in 1988; Premier of Western Australia (1990-1993), Australia’s first woman state premier; Member of the national Australian Parliament for Fremantle (1994-2007); served 1994-1996 as both Minister for Human Services and Health and Minister for Women. Elected as national president of the Labor Party (2004-2005).
- March 2, 1961 – Simone M. Young born, Australian conductor; first woman conductor at the Vienna State Opera (1993); the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra in Norway (1998-2002), Opera Australia in Sydney (2001-2003); Hamburg State Opera (2005-2015).
- March 2, 1980 – Rebel Wilson born, Australian writer, producer, actress, and singer; she wrote, produced and starred in the 2008 musical comedy series Bogan Pride; best known in the U.S. for the movies Bridesmaids and Pitch Perfect; Wilson is a supporter of stricter gun laws in the U.S.,“I don’t like getting political but America you really have to follow Australia’s example re gun laws. I don’t remember a mass shooting in Australia since they overhauled the gun laws. It seems like every week in America there’s a shooting. I just want people to be safe, especially people that are doing one of my favorite things in the world—going out to the movies to have fun.”
- March 2, 1986 – Corazon Aquino is sworn into office as the first woman president of the Philippines (1986-1992); her first public declaration restores the civil rights of the citizens of her country.
- March 2, 2016 – Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt: The Supreme Court's eight justices appeared divided as they heard oral arguments on a challenge to a Texas law placing tough regulations on abortion clinics. The four liberal justices appeared united in believing the restrictions interfere with a woman's constitutional right to an abortion. Three conservative justices appeared to believe there was little evidence the law had forced clinics to close. In June 2016, the court ruled 5-3 that the Texas law imposes an “undue burden” on women seeking abortions because its regulations have forced too many clinics to shut down. The law could have left as few as 10 clinics in the entire state if it were allowed to take full effect, out of the current 20 clinics remaining open, according to abortion law experts. Before the Texas law was passed, there were 42 women’s healthcare clinics operating in the state.
- March 2, 2020 – In the UK, the government proposed an addition to a long-awaited domestic abuse bill to address the use of the ‘rough sex’ defence in murder cases to escape justice. The latest version of the abuse bill awaited its first reading in the House of Commons after being stalled when Boris Johnson prorogued parliament and the general election was called. In June 2020, the UK government published a new clause in its Domestic Abuse Bill which outlaws the ‘rough sex’ defence, used by men to claim that their victims had died when consensual sex ‘went wrong.’ The activist group We Can’t Consent To This, a leader in the campaign against the ‘rough sex’ defense, declared it “a victory.” Member of Parliament Harriet Harman tweeted, “Govt publish new clause for Domestic Abuse Bill to end rough sex defence. Milestone moment in battle to challenge male violence against women. This will stop men literally getting away with murder by saying it's what she wanted.”
- March 2, 2021 – In Afghanistan, three young women who worked for Enikass TV, an Afghan television station, were shot to death in the eastern city of Jalalabad, the latest in a string of targeted assassinations that had increasingly overshadowed US-brokered attempts to negotiate an end to the country’s civil war. Zalmai Latifi, the director at Enikass TV, said the women worked in the station’s dubbing department and were killed in two separate attacks. “They are all dead. They were going home from the office on foot when they were shot,” he told Agence France-Presse. Another woman was injured in the shootings and taken to hospital, where she was listed in critical condition. The women were high school students who worked part-time at Enikass, according to Orzala Ashraf Nemat, head of the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU) think-tank based in Kabul. Nemat said on Twitter: “an absolute shameful and deliberate act of terror. Please don’t condemn it only, take action to stop this bloodshed.” The assassinations came after Malala Maiwand, a prominent feminist and civil rights activist, who was an anchor for Enikass, had been assassinated in December, 2020, while on her morning commute. Her driver was also murdered. Police said they arrested an armed suspect with Taliban links for these latest attacks, but Taliban leaders denied any role in the killings. Journalists, human rights campaigners, civil society activists, and others working toward a democratic society had all been targeted by gunmen in prior months.
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- March 3, 1678 – Madeleine de Verchères born as Marie-Madeleine Jarret, Canadian New France leader; as a 14-year-old girl, she led a fight against Iroquois warriors who were attacking Fort Verchères, preventing the Iroquois from capturing the fort.
- March 3, 1873 – U.S. Congress enacts the Comstock Law, making it illegal to send any “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” books through the mail; it was used against Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and other women activists to try to prevent distribution of information about contraceptives. The law was named for Anthony Comstock, a salaried special agent of the New York Committee for the Suppression of Vice, who relentlessly lobbied Congress for its passage. For the first time, it became a felony to use the U.S. mails to carry such material and the law provided for a fine of $5,000 and imprisonment up to five years for the first offense, with $10,000 and ten years as a limit for subsequent offenses. Not only did Comstock get the law passed, but he got himself appointed as a special agent of the Post Office to enforce the law. He also managed to obtain for himself or the society a portion of the fines collected from successful prosecutions. In the first year under the law, Comstock boasted he had seized 200,000 pictures and photographs, 100,000 books, and more than 60,000 rubber articles (i.e., contraceptives). He also seized more than 50,000 packs of playing cards and 30,000 boxes of pills and powders having aphrodisiac qualities. He also extended his power by becoming a consultant to the customs office for the port of New York, which allowed him to censor materials coming from overseas. After Dr. Edward Bliss Foote, author of Medical Common Sense: Applied to the Causes, Prevention and Cure of Chronic Diseases and Unhappiness in Marriage, was successfully prosecuted in 1873 for disseminating birth control information, contraceptive information went underground in the United States. The Comstock Law was enforced until 1965 when the landmark decision of Griswold v. Connecticut found it unconstitutional to restrict access to birth control because it interfered with a person's right to privacy.
- March 3, 1882 – Elisabeth Abegg born, German educator and resistance fighter against Nazism, who sheltered about 80 Jews during the Holocaust. Born in Strasbourg, she moved to Berlin in 1918 after earning a doctorate in classical philology and Romance studies from Leipzig University. She was involved in post-WWI relief work organized by the Quaker community, was an active member of the German Democratic Party, and taught at the Luisengymnasium Berlin (a secondary school for girls). When Hitler came to power in 1933, she openly criticized the Nazi regime, and was punished by being transferred to another school. In 1938, the Gestapo questioned her. In 1941, she was forced to retire from teaching, and officially converted to Quakerism. In 1942, she started helping Jews find safe shelter, then established an extensive network of rescuers among Quaker friends and her former students. She sold her jewelry to pay for the escape of some Jews to Switzerland, and tutored Jewish children while they were hidden in her apartment. After WWII ended, she resumed teaching in Berlin, and continued to be active in Quaker groups and joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany. In 1947, a group of Jews she had rescued published a book, And a Light Shined in the Darkness, dedicated to her. Abegg received the Verdienstkreuz am Bande (Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany) in 1957, and was recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Veshem in 1967.
- March 3, 1887 – Anne Sullivan arrives at the Alabama home of Captain and Mrs. Arthur H. Keller to become the teacher of their blind and deaf 6-year-old daughter, Helen.
- March 3, 1893 – Hanya Holm born in Germany, modern dance pioneer; emigrated to the U.S.in 1931, taught dancing in many states, choreographed ballets, including Metropolitan Daily (1938), the first ballet televised in the U.S.; she also choreographed for theatre, movies, and opera.
- March 3, 1893 – Beatrice Wood born, American illustrator, sculptor, and acclaimed studio potter; co-founder/editor of The Blind Man magazine with artist Marcel Duchamp and writer Henri-Pierre Roché in 1917. Her autobiography, I Shock Myself, was published in 1985 when she was 90 years old, but she lived to be 105. She said about her long life: “I owe it all to chocolate and young men.”
- March 3, 1900 – Ruby Dandridge born as Ruby Butler, African American actress, best known for roles on the radio shows Amos ‘n Andy and the Judy Canova Show. In 1937, she played one of the witches in a “sepia” (all black cast) version of Macbeth at the Maya Theatre in Los Angeles. She was the mother of actress Dorothy Dandridge.
- March 3, 1902 – Isabel Bishop born, American painter and graphic artist; a leading member of the “14th Street” School, best known for depicting young, lower-middle class American office workers. She was the focus of a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1975), honored with an Outstanding Achievement in the Arts Award by President Carter (1979). Bishop lived to be 85 years old. She described her work: “I was always out. I saw these people. I studied their faces and their gestures, their habits. And then I made compositions.”
- March 3, 1913 – Margaret Bonds born, African American pianist and composer, one of the first black composers to gain recognition in the U.S.; member of the National Association of Negro Musicians, and founded the Margaret Bonds Chamber Society, black musicians group performing works by classical black composers; best known for her frequent collaboration with poet Langston Hughes, including her voice and piano setting of The Negro Speaks of Rivers. She wrote Montgomery Variations for orchestra in honor of Martin Luther King Jr and the 1965 Freedom March from Selma to Montgomery.
- March 3, 1913 – The Suffrage Procession, led by Inez Milholland on a white horse, first suffragist parade in Washington DC, organized by suffrage strategist Alice Paul and her committee, which includes Lucy Burns, for the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Thousands of suffragists marched down Pennsylvania Avenue on the day before President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration “... in a spirit of protest against the present political organization of society, from which women are excluded,” the official program said.
- March 3, 1917 – Sameera Moussa born, one of the first Egyptian nuclear scientists and the first woman to hold a post at Cairo University; her work made medical use of nuclear technology affordable; organizer of the first Atomic Energy for Peace Conference. She died at age 35 in an accident while traveling in the U.S.
- March 3, 1943 – Myra Sadker born, pioneer in the study of gender bias in American schools; she and her husband David Sadker studied and researched gender roles in children’s literature, and challenged both blatant and subtle sexism in the education of girls; they co-authored Sexism in School and Society, and Failing at Fairness: How Our Schools Cheat Girls. She died of breast cancer at age 53 in 1995. The Myra Sadker Advocates (now the Myra Sadker Foundation) was founded in 1998 by her husband to continue and publicize their work.
- March 3, 1945 – Hattie Winston born, African American actress and singer; played Valerie the Librarian on the PBS children’s series, The Electric Company. She was national co-chair for the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) Equal Employment Opportunities Committee. In 1998, she donated the Hattie Winston African American Scripts and Screenplays Collection to Kentucky’s University of Louisville. In 2006, she was a reader for “Slave Narratives: A Mighty, Mighty People” for Stories On Stage, a non-profit performing arts organization.
- March 3, 1949 – Bonnie J. Dunbar born, American engineer, academic, worked for NASA (1978-2005), and served as an astronaut on five missions beginning in 1985; honored with the NASA Superior Accomplishment Medal in 1997; president and CEO of The Museum of Flight (2005-2010); head of the University of Houston’s STEM Center (2013-2015); professor of aerospace engineering at Texas A&M University since 2016.
- March 3, 1951 – Lindsay Cooper born, English bassoon and oboe player, prolific composer, and articulate political activist protesting the unequal status of women in music, and all oppression and inequality. Though a classically trained musician, she was best-known as a member of the rock band Henry Cow, but also collaborated with other bands and with jazz musicians, and known as an extraordinary improviser. In 1977, she co-founded the Feminist Improvising Group (FIG) with Maggie Nicols, a jazz and experimental music ensemble. Cooper was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in the late 1970s, but did not did not disclose it to the musical community until the late 1990s when her illness reached the stage where she could no longer perform live. In September 2013, Cooper died from complications of MS and pneumonia at age 62.
- March 3, 1962 – Jackie Joyner-Kersee born, one of the world’s greatest women athletes, with records in the long jump (1988) and the heptathlon (1986); won 3 gold, 1 silver, and 2 bronze medals in 4 Olympic games.
- March 3, 1976 – Kampamba Mulenga Chilumba born, Zambian Patriotic Front politician; she has been a Member of Zambia’s Parliament since 2016; served as Minister of Fisheries and Livestock (2018), as Minister of Information and Broadcasting (2016).
- March 3, 2005 – Margaret Wilson is elected as Speaker of the New Zealand House of Representatives, beginning a period lasting until August 23, 2006, where all the highest political offices, including Elizabeth II as Head of State, were occupied by women, making New Zealand the first country with all women in positions of highest power.
- March 3, 2016 – Honduran indigenous leader Berta Cáceres is murdered. A member of her group, the Indian Council of People's Organizations of Honduras, said at least two assailants broke into her house and shot her. The Lenca Indian activist won the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize for her role in fighting a dam project on the Gualcarque River, considered sacred by the Lencas, and essential to their survival. Prior to her death, Cáceres had reported receiving death threats from police, soldiers, and landowners because of her activism.
- March 3, 2020 – In the UK, a government inquiry found that women giving birth were refused epidurals in a breach of National Institute for Health guidelines. The Department of Health and Social Care also found that women may not have been fully informed that if they choose to give birth at home or in a midwife-led unit they might have to be transferred if they wanted an epidural. Health Minister Nadine Dorries wrote to all heads and directors of midwifery and medical directors at NHS trusts to remind them of the NICE guidance regarding pain relief during childbirth and to ensure it was being followed. Clare Murphy, director of external affairs at the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, said the “results of the government’s inquiry are sadly not surprising. We have spoken with many women who have been so traumatised by their experience of childbirth that they are considering ending what would otherwise be wanted pregnancies. Pain relief is sometimes treated as a ‘nice extra’ rather than an integral part of maternity care, and women and their families can suffer profoundly as a result. Staffing shortages may be an issue but we also know women may experience gatekeeping by healthcare professionals and be told labour ‘is meant to be hard work’.”
- March 3, 2021 – Vice President Kamala Harris broke a tie in the U.S. Senate to begin debate on the coronavirus relief package. After the Senate deadlocked on whether to take up the package, the vice-president was forced to cast a tie-breaking 51st vote to approve the motion to proceed. Senate clerks began reading the full text of the 628-page bill. After the bill passed, it returned to the House for final passage before being signed into law by President Biden.
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- March 4, 1781 – Rebecca Gratz born, Jewish American educator and philanthropist; co-founder of the Female Association for the Relief of Women and Children in Reduced Circumstances in 1801, which aided widows and orphans after the American Revolutionary War, and later, the War of 1812; also helped found the Philadelphia Orphan Asylum in 1815, and served on its board for the next 40 years; in 1819, she was co-founder of the Female Hebrew Benevolent Society; in 1855, her advocacy helped establish the Jewish Foster Home, and later the Fuel Society and the Sewing Society; Gratz College was founded in her memory.
- March 4, 1815 – Myrtilla Miner born, American educator and abolitionist, she established the Normal School for Colored Girls in Washington DC before the Civil War, in spite of threats and vandalism, even arson; her school merged with other schools to become the University of the District of Columbia.
- March 4, 1889 – Pearl White born, American silent film star; a former circus bareback rider, she was one of the first women of “action” in the movies, who did the majority of her own stunts in serial films, most notably in The Perils of Pauline; unlike the usual screaming-in-terror-and-fainting heroines, she was plucky and resourceful; but when a spinal injury from a stunt gone wrong led to drug and alcohol abuse, her career plummeted, and she died of a “liver ailment” at age 49.
- March 4, 1895 – Margaret D. Foster born, American chemist who joined the U.S. Geological Survey three days after graduation in 1918, the first woman hired by the Survey as a chemist. She focused on analysis of natural waters: surface waters, hot springs, and ground waters. Foster wrote papers on new methods for quantitative analysis of manganese, boron, sulphate, and fluoride in water, and also studied the ground waters of the South Atlantic Coastal Plain and in the Houston-Galveston area in Texas. She was recruited during WWII for the Manhattan Project, and worked on new quantitative methods of analysis for uranium and for thorium. After the war, she studied the geochemistry of the platy minerals: clays, micas, chlorites and glauconites.
- March 4, 1899 – Elizabeth Wood born, taught English at Vassar (1922-1926); she was involved in social welfare in FDR’s Public Works Administration in 1934, where her plans to create housing that included play areas and racial diversity were undercut when residents were not involved in the planning; she was the first executive secretary of the newly created Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) in 1937.
- March 4, 1902 – On this date, the British House of Commons finally takes up the report of the Ladies Commission, headed by Millicent Fawcett, concerning the appalling conditions which caused the deaths of thousands from illness and starvation in the concentration camps holding Boer women and children during and after the Second Anglo-Boer War. While the commission’s report had been finished since December 12, 1901, it was not published in Britain until February, 1902. The Opposition party made the following motion: “This House deplores the great mortality in the concentration camps formed in the execution of the policy of clearing the country.” In his reply to them, Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain stated it was the Boers who forced the British ‘scorched earth’ policy on them, and the camps were an effort to ‘minimize’ the horrors of war. The Opposition motion was defeated by 230 votes to 119. The Ladies Commission was formed because of the outcry caused when Emily Hobhouse, founder of the Distress Fund for South African Women and Children, came back from South Africa in 1900 and went to the newspapers with her story of the overcrowding, inadequate sanitation, food and potable water shortages, and lack of medical aid in the concentration camps. The Ladies Commission did not address the horrifying plight of the non-combatant black Africans forced to labor in separate concentration camps. When Emily Hobhouse pointed this out to Mr. H.R. Fox, secretary of the Aborigines Protection Society, he wrote on March 24 to Colonial Secretary Chamberlain, requesting the government institute an additional inquiry into the conditions in these camps, and “secure for the natives who are detained no less care and humanity than are now prescribed for the Boer refugees." Sir Montague Ommaney, permanent under-secretary at the Colonial Office, recorded later it seemed undesirable “to trouble Lord Milner ... merely to satisfy this busybody.” Lord Milner was the British Administrator (1901-1902) and then first Governor (1902-1905) of the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony.
- March 4, 1913 – Marguerite Taos Amrouche born, Algerian author and singer; in 1947, she was the first Algerian women to publish a novel in French, Jacinthe noire (Black Hyacinth); she also collected and interpreted Kabylie Berber songs; probably best known for Le Grain magique (The Magic Grain), a collection of legends, short stories, songs, poems, and proverbs from the Kabyle, which she translated from Berber into French. Taos Amrouche recorded several phonograph albums, and produced a number of programs for French radio and television, including Chants sauvés de l’oubli (“Songs Saved from Oblivion”) and Hommage au chant profond (“Homage to a Profound Song”).
- March 4, 1914 – Barbara Newhall Follett born, American child prodigy who began writing poetry at age four, published her first novel, The House Without Windows, when she was 12, and The Voyage of the Norman D. when she was 14; but in 1928, her father abandoned the family for another woman; devastated, she was unable to write for several years, she and her mother fell on hard times during the Depression; at 16, she worked as a secretary, but then began writing again, including the novel Lost Island, and later a travelogue called Travel Without a Donkey; she married at 19, but after six years, she discovered her husband was unfaithful; according to a statement made by the husband, they quarreled, and she left their apartment with $30 in her pocket. But he didn’t report her missing for two weeks, “waiting for her to return.” Though very suspicious of foul play, the police turned up no evidence in their investigation, and what happened to her is still a mystery.
- March 4, 1917 – Jeannette Rankin (Republican-Montana) takes her seat as the first woman elected to the House of Representatives; a staunch pacifist, when her first major vote came up on April 6, 1917, she voted against the U.S. declaring war on Germany. Rankin was also a suffragist, organizing and lobbying for legislation enfranchising women in several states including Montana, New York, and North Dakota. While in Congress, she introduced legislation that eventually became the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, granting unrestricted voting rights to women nationwide. She lost her bid for re-election in 1918, but was sent back to Congress by voters in Montana in 1941, and cast the only vote against the U.S. entering WWII. She was again not re-elected. Rankin championed a multitude of diverse women's rights and civil rights causes, including banning child labor, throughout a career which spanned over six decades.
- March 4, 1931 – Alice Rivlin born, American economist and politician: Congressional Budget Office Director (1975-1983); White House Office of Management and Budget Director (1994-1996); Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve System (1996-1999).
- March 4, 1932 – Miriam Makeba born, South African singer, civil rights and anti-apartheid activist, who helped popularize African music around the world.
- March 4, 1933 – Frances Perkins begins her term as Secretary of Labor (1933-1945), the first woman to serve in a U.S. Presidential cabinet.
- March 4, 1942 – Lynn Sherr born, American broadcast journalist, correspondent for the TV news magazine 20/20; a feminist activist, she was honored in 1989 and again in 1992 with the Planned Parenthood Margaret Sanger Award “for exceptional coverage of reproductive rights.”
- March 4, 1945 – Eighteen-year-old Princess Elizabeth, heir presumptive to the throne of Great Britain, signs up to do her part during WWII, as a driver for the British Auxiliary (women’s division) of the Transport Service.
- March 4, 1946 – Patricia Kennealy-Morrison born, American science fiction/fantasy and mystery writer; author of The Keltiad, and the Rennie Stride mystery series. As the editor-in-chief of Jazz & Pop magazine in the late 1960s, she was one of the first women rock music critics.
- March 4, 1948 – Jean O’Leary born, lesbian and gay rights activist, founder of Lesbian Feminist Liberation, one of the first lesbian activist groups in the women’s movement. She was an early member and co-director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and co-founded National Coming Out Day.
- March 4, 1950 – Ofelia Medina born as María Ofelia Medina Torres, Mexican actress, singer, and screenwriter. She has portrayed Frida Kahlo in the play Cada quien su Frida (To each his Frida) in theatres in Mexico and abroad. In 2005, she won an Ariel Award for Best Actress for Voces Inocentes, from Academia Mexicana de Artes y Ciencias Cinematográficas. Medina is an active supporter of the indigenous people of southern Mexico.
- March 4, 1951 – Theresa Hak Kyung Cha born in South Korea, American novelist, producer, director, and avant-garde artist, who came to the U.S. with her family when she as 10 years old. She is best known for her 1982 novel, Dictee. She was raped and murdered by a serial rapist one week after her book was published. Cha was 31 years old when she was murdered. Her videos, artwork and archives were donated to the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) in 1992.
- March 4, 1954 – Irina Ratushinskaya born, Russian writer and poet, Soviet dissident who was sent first to a labor camp in 1983, then prison, including a year in solitary confinement, before her release in 1986; Grey is the Colour of Hope is a memoir of her incarceration.
- March 4, 1966 – Fiona Ma born, American Democratic politician and Certified Public Accountant; Treasurer of California since 2019; Chair of the California Board of Equalization (2016-2017); California Board of Equalization member (2015-2019); Speaker pro tempore of the California Assembly (2010-2012); California State Assembly member (2006-2012); Member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors (2002-2006). Ma has actively promoted women and diversity in public office, and received the 2015 Emerge California’s Woman of the Year Award for her efforts. She wrote and initiated passage of legislation banning toxic chemicals in plastics and children’s toys. Her language was later used by U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein in the federal Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, signed into law in 2008.
- March 4, 1971 – Clare Baker born, Professor of Comparative Developmental Neurobiology in the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge; known for her work on the development of neurogenic placodes and the neural crest.
- March 4, 1982 – Cate Edwards born, American attorney who represents victims of civil rights violations and corporate negligence. She is also a founding member of the board of Generation Engage, a non-profit organization which combines grassroots outreach and new technologies to increase civil participation among young Americans who lack college experience.
- March 4, 1983 – Bertha Wilson is appointed as the first woman judge on Canada’s Supreme Court.
- March 4, 1998 – In Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that federal law banning on-the-job sexual harassment still applies when both parties are the same sex.
- March 4, 2002 – Canada bans human embryo cloning but permits government-funded scientists to use embryos left over from fertility treatment or abortions.
- March 4, 2020 – In Pakistan, dozens of seminary students linked to a radical pro-Taliban cleric defaced a mural depicting two women painted by women’s rights activists to commemorate International Women’s Day in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, according to both activists and police. The women’s rights-themed mural painted on the wall of a house near the sprawling Jamia Hafsa seminary was spray painted black. The defacing of the mural came after a court earlier ruled that rights activists could organize a women’s rights march. Police said they have opened an investigation into the incident and so far no one has been arrested. There have been annual ‘Aurat Marches’ (women’s marches) in Pakistan on International Women’s Day since 2018, and each year, the number of participants has grown. Leena Ghani, one of the Hum Aurtien (We are Women) organizers of the march in Lahore, said that an ongoing smear campaign was initiated against women's rights activists after the success of the first ‘Aurat March.’ She underlined, "We march peacefully, and it is our constitutional right." Pakistani women have largely been deprived of their rights since the country gained its independence in 1947. About 1,000 women are killed every year by relatives in so-called honor killings. The World Economic Forum ranked Pakistan 151 out of 153 countries in its annual Global Gender Gap Index Report for 2020.
- March 4, 2021 – About 200,000 women in the UK could be in line for pension back-payments averaging £13,500 (about $18,346 USD) after an investigation into the underpayment of state pensions over the last 20 years. Some of the affected women received pensions of as little as 86 pence a week, when they were in fact entitled to 60% of the basic state pension – about £80 a week, which should have been paid to them automatically. After a campaign by former pensions minister Steve Webb, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) agreed to fully investigate the problem and backdate the payments the women should have received. The DWP expects the final bill will be about £2.7bn (almost $3,670,000 USD).
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- March 5, 1842 – A. Viola Neblett born, American temperance leader, suffragist, and women’s rights pioneer; tireless worker for temperance in South Carolina, and co-founded the South Carolina Equal Rights Association — the first woman in her state to declare her support publically for woman suffrage. She traveled the state arranging venues for woman suffrage speakers, and led a group of suffragists to the South Carolina Constitutional Convention in 1895, where they lobbied the delegates, supplied suffrage literature, and held hearings before two committees. She and Virginia Durant Young, representing the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), and Laura Clay of the Kentucky Equal Rights Association, spoke before the entire Convention. Although the woman’s suffrage initiative was not passed, Neblett and Young succeeded in getting South Carolina’s age of consent raised from 10 to 14, and gaining women the right to be legal guardians of their children. When she died at age 55 in 1897, Neblett left $500 in her will to the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
- March 5, 1852 – Lady Augusta Gregory born, Irish writer, folklorist, and playwright; co-founder of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, and a leader of the Irish Literary Revival.
- March 5, 1871 – Rosa Luxemburg born, Polish economist, Marxist theorist, philosopher, feminist, revolutionary socialist, and anti-war activist; she became a naturalized German citizen at age 28, and joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). She broke with the party when it supported German involvement in WWI, and co-founded Spartakusbund (the Spartacus League), an anti-war group with Karl Liebknecht, which later became the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). She also found its newspaper, Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag), the central organ of the Spartacist movement, during the November Revolution (1917-1923). The revolution was evolved from a series of strikes as sailors refused to take orders, and workers, fed up with the war and growing food shortages, went on strike. The country’s federal constitutional monarchy lost control after losing WWI, and was replaced with a democratic parliamentary republic, Deutsches Reich (1918-1933), which ended after Adolph Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933. When the Spartakusbund staged an uprising in 1919, even though she thought it was a mistake, Luxemburg went along with it. She and Karl Liebknecht were captured by the Freikorps (an all-volunteer military group), questioned under torture, then summarily executed. Her body was flung into Berlin’s Landwehr Canal. Luxemburg is noted for her book, “The Accumulation of Capital” which was highly controversial among Leftists and Communists when it was published in 1913.
- March 5, 1882 – Dora Marsden born, English radical feminist, literary modernist journal editor; she first joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) headed by Emmeline Pankhurst, but found the organization too focused on middle-class women, and left in 1911 to found The Freewoman, a weekly feminist newspaper which only lasted a year, but published articles on women’s paid work, housework, motherhood, the suffrage movement, and literature. The frank discussions of sexuality, advocacy of free love, and encouragement for women to remain single brought it much notoriety. Although its circulation was very small, writers like Rebecca West and H.G.Wells, who were contributors, added to its cachet. It was revived in 1913 as The New Freewoman journal, which became The Egoist (1914-1919), focusing more on philosophical concepts and literary works, and much influenced by Rebecca West, Ezra Pound, and suffragette-trade unionist Mary Gawthorpe. It was also a much more successful journal than the two previous publications, and was a pioneer in publishing modernist poetry and fiction.
- March 5, 1885 – Louise Pearce born, one of the foremost pathologists of the early 20th century. In 1913, she was the first woman to be hired for a research position at the Rockefeller Institute. She researched and developed a treatment for trypanosomiasis (African sleeping sickness), working with chemists Michael Heidelberger and Walter Abraham Jacobs, and pathologist Wade Hampton Brown, in 1919. Pearce traveled to the Belgian Congo in 1920, and carried out a drug testing protocol for human trials which she had designed, to establish the drug tryparsamide's safety, effectiveness, and optimum dosage. In spite of her success, she wasn’t promoted to associate member of the Institute until 1923, and was never promoted to be a full member. She was awarded the Order of the Crown of Belgium in 1921 for her work, and was also elected as a member of the Belgian Society of Tropical Medicine. She attended the society’s meetings from 1921 to 1939. Pearce and Brown developed protocols to apply tryparsamide to syphilis, and studied animal models of cancer tumors. Pearce later researched senescence, eye defects, osteopetrosis, cystic disease, and hydrocephalus, adding much data toward understanding of these conditions.
- March 5, 1900 – Lilli Jahn born, German-Jewish physician; in 1943, after she had separated from her husband and moved Kassel from Immenhausen, she was denounced for an improper name card by her doorbell – Jewish women were required by the Nazis to add ‘Sara’ to their name, and all Jews forbidden to use the title Doctor. She was arrested, interrogated, and sent to the Breitenau labor camp, while her underage children were left on their own; the letters she smuggled out to her children were later published by them, but she was deported to Auschwitz in 1944, and died there, exact date unknown.
- March 5, 1922 – “Annie Oakley” (Phoebe Ann Moses) breaks all existing records for women’s trap shooting, hitting 98 out of 100 targets.
- March 5, 1931 – Geraldyn (Jerrie) Cobb born, record-setting aviator, first woman to pass the qualifying exams for astronaut training (1959) but was not allowed to train because of her gender.
- March 5, 1935 – Letizia Battaglia born, Italian photojournalist, notable for her work documenting the Sicilian Mafia; a member of the Green Party, she served on the city council of Palermo (1985-1991) and as a Deputy at the Sicilian Regional Assembly (1991-1996); a feminist, she co-founded Mezzocielo (Half-the-Sky), a women’s journal.
- March 5, 1938 – Lynn Margulis born, American biologist and evolutionary theorist; noted for her work on Symbiogenesis, the evolution of eukaryotic cells (cells with a nucleus). Her theory that cell organelles such as mitochondria and chloroplasts were once independent bacteria was largely ignored for another decade, before becoming widely accepted only after the theory was powerfully substantiated through genetic evidence. Margulis was elected a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1983.
- March 5, 1998 – NASA Astronaut and Air Force Lt. Col. Eileen Collins is announced as the leader of Columbia’s crew on a mission to launch a large X-ray telescope, the first woman to command a space shuttle.
- March 5, 2014 – The Invisible War, a documentary by Kirby Dick, suggests that one in five serving women officers in the U.S. military has been sexually assaulted, and that the victims are expected to suffer in silence what is regarded as an occupational hazard and, by many, as a male officers' perk. In its hamfisted attempts to tackle the problem, the U.S. army has stigmatised the victims with a grotesquely insulting "Ask Her When She's Sober" poster campaign about dating, aimed at men – rather than taking action against violent serial predators who find the army a natural habitat. One of the victims highlighted in the film is Lieutenant Elle Helmer, a Marine. The harassment started as soon as she arrived at the Marine Barracks in Washington DC. She was told that she was selected to be the public affairs officer for the barracks based on her appearance. A captain continually commented on her appearance and began to harass her, making sexual advances and sending her inappropriate emails. She refused his advances, and complained to the Marine Barracks' equal opportunity officer, providing copies of the emails and details about the harassment. The Marine Corps did nothing. She was named to serve as the first female ceremonial parade flanking officer, and was told by her superior, a major, that a St. Patrick’s Day pub crawl endorsed by the colonel was a mandatory work event when she objected. Lieutenant Helmer was required to drink shots at the same pace as the male officers. When she drank water to try to keep herself from becoming intoxicated, she was required by her boss to drink an extra shot as punishment. She became very drunk, and left to find a cab to go home. The major followed her out, and told her that she needed to come with him to his office to discuss a business matter. When they reached his office, the major tried to kiss her. Helmer resisted. The major grabbed her, knocking her over. She hit her head against the wall, and lost consciousness. She awoke to find she was lying on the floor of the major's office wearing his shorts. The major, naked from the waist down, was passed out nearby. Lieutenant Helmer reported to command that she had been raped. Her colonel discouraged her from asking for a rape kit examination, saying it would be “out of his hands.'' In spite of the colonel's objections, Lieutenant Helmer sought and obtained a rape kit and medical examination. Even with the evidence, the Navy Criminal Investigative Services initially refused to investigate, claiming Lieutenant Helmer's inability to recall her rape precluded any investigation. After a delay that destroyed the crime scene, the NCIS eventually conducted a very brief investigation and concluded that nothing could be done in light of Lieutenant Helmer's lack of consciousness during the assault. In addition, the Marine Corps “lost” Helmer’s rape kit. When she complained to the major’s superior, he admitted that the NCIS investigation had been “woefully inadequate,'' but since he had removed the major from his command position, he would not press charges or take any further steps. Instead, he told Lieutenant Helmer, “You're from Colorado. You're tough. You need to pick yourself up and dust yourself off. I can't babysit you all the time.” She became the subject of investigation and prosecution, and was forced to leave the Marine Corps, while her rapist remained a Marine in good standing. The film argues that this “system of justice” makes the U.S. military a rapists' playground because the commander is the only person to whom a case can be brought, and he will almost certainly be acquainted with the assailant, he may even have a professional investment in the assailant's career and, in many cases, he will be the assailant himself.
- March 5, 2017 – Hundreds of active-duty Marines allegedly shared nude photos of female service members and veterans online without their consent. Representative Adam Smith (Democrat-Washington), House Armed Services Committee ranking member, called for the Marine Corps to conduct an inquiry, calling the alleged actions "degrading, dangerous, and completely unacceptable." Hundreds of photos featuring at least two dozen women were posted to the private Marines United Facebook page, which has 30,000 male members, all of them U.S. Marines, Navy Corpsman, or British Royal Marines.
- March 5, 2020 – Senator Elizabeth Warren (Democrat-Massachusetts) dropped out of the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. Warren was the last top-tier woman in a field that once contained a record number of women candidates. She briefly became a frontrunner, but then lost ground to Senator Bernie Sanders (Independent-Vermont) in the battle for progressive voters focused on limiting the power of the wealthy and making government more responsive to the working class. Warren's departure disappointed voters who hoped she would be the nation's first woman president. "One of the hardest parts of this," Warren said, "is all those little girls who are going to have to wait four more years."
- March 5, 2021 – UK Ministers insisted the country cannot afford more than a 1% pay raise for over a million National Health Service (NHS) workers, even as nurses’ leaders met to discuss strike action. Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Matt Hancock had repeatedly praised NHS workers for their efforts during the pandemic, but recommended the small increase, claiming it was a good deal because NHS staff would be excluded from a wider public sector pay freeze. He also ruled out a one-off payment for health staff in recognition of their work in the pandemic, as promised by the Scottish government to its workforce, saying this “isn’t the approach we have chosen to take.” Responding to a question from the Nursing Times about a potential staffing crisis if demoralised nurses quit in large numbers, Hancock said his grandmother had been a nurse in Lincolnshire, adding: “I bow to nobody in my admiration for nurses.” Over 88% of NHS staffers are women. The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) had requested a 12.5% increase, and called the 1% figure “pitiful.” In an emergency meeting RCN agreed to set up a £35m fund to support members in the event of a strike. The British Medical Association and unions representing other staff similarly furious. While a 2018 deal gave nurses and other health staff a salary increase of at least 6.5% over three years, this was after seven years of near pay freezes during the period of austerity politics. A 3% raise increase was negotiated for 2021-2022, but in October 2021, unions were still polling their numbers on their willingness to take industrial action over the 2021-2022 NHS pay deal when Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak announced that the NHS Pay Review Body would recommend an additional pay increase in 2022. Pat Cullen, RCN General Secretary called the announcement “a tacit acknowledgement from ministers that they have underpaid nursing staff.”
- March 5, 2022 – In the UK, the Guardian reported that supporters of the Million Women Rise collective walked in London from Charing Cross police station to Scotland Yard, banging drums, chanting, and carrying signs “Women’s rights are human rights,” “Girls just wanna have equal rights,” and “The future is female.” Many wore red, which they said symbolised the blood of women who have died at the hands of men.
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- March 6, 1806 – Elizabeth Barrett Browning born, English poet and writer; in frail health, she used her pen to campaign for the abolition of slavery and influence reform of child labour laws. After the publication of her Poems in 1844 was much acclaimed, Robert Browning began a correspondence with her, which turned into a secret courtship and marriage. Her father disinherited her when he learned of their wedding. She and her husband moved to Italy in 1846, where she gave birth to their son in 1849. Her health continued to decline, and she died in Florence in 1861. Robert Browning published her last poems posthumously.
- March 6, 1858 – Lilian Welsh born, American physician, educator, suffragist, and advocate for women’s health, particularly "preventive medicine and the health of expectant mothers and babies."
- March 6, 1863 – Carrie Belle Kearney born into a family that lost their plantation after the Civil War. She was a teacher, author, suffragist, temperance reformer, and white racist. She supported suffrage for white women to bring about "immediate and durable white supremacy …” Her autobiography A Slaveholder’s Daughter was published in 1900. In 1924, Kearney was the first woman elected to the Mississippi State Senate.
- March 6, 1882 – Sarah Wambaugh born, American political scientist, one of the world’s leading authorities on plebiscites; she was an adviser to various commissions, including the U.N. Plebiscite Commission to Jammu and Kashmir. She died at age 73 in 1955.
- March 6, 1886 – The Nightingale, the first nursing journal, begins publication, edited by Sarah E. Post M.D.
- March 6, 1893 – Ella Phillips Stewart born, one of the first African-American women pharmacists. She was the oldest child of sharecroppers in Virginia, who was sent at age six to live with her grandmother so she could go to school. She was top of her class, and won major scholarships to Storer Normal School for her secondary education, but left school to get married, and moved with her husband to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. When their only child died at age three of whooping cough, they divorced. Stewart began working in a pharmacy as a bookkeeper, and became interested in becoming a pharmacist. In spite of the prejudice against African Americans and women, she was admitted to the University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy in 1914. In 1916, she became the first black woman to graduate from Pitt’s pharmacy program, and to pass the state examination. After working briefly as an assistant pharmacist, she opened her own drugstore at the General Hospital in Braddock, Pennsylvania. In 1918, she moved back to Pittsburgh and opened her pharmacy there. When she married William Stewart, another pharmacist, they worked in several cities before settling in Toledo, Ohio, and opening Stewarts’ Pharmacy in 1922. She became involved in African-American civic and service organizations, including the YWCA, the Enterprise Charity Club, the Ohio Association of Colored Women, and she was president of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (1948-1952). In 1952, she was a delegate to the International Conference of Women of the World in Athens, Greece, and then became a goodwill ambassador for the U.S. government. In 1963, she was appointed to the U.S. commission of UNESCO. She died in Toledo at the age of 94 in 1987.
- March 6, 1904 – Sylvia Sayer born, British conservationist and preservationist whose tireless efforts helped preserve the Dartmoor moorland. Dartmoor National Park, the fourth national park to be created in the UK, was established in 1951.
- March 6, 1910 – Ella Logan born in Scotland as Georgina Allen, Scottish-American Broadway singer and actress, who became a nightclub singer, often outside the U.S., because she was hounded from 1945 to 1961 by the FBI, who suspected her of having communist ties in spite of never finding any evidence to support the allegation. They placed her Los Angeles home under surveillance, monitored her activities and travels, and once searched her during a trip to New York, because of groundless suspicions that she was a “Russian courier agent.” Due to testimony by John J. Huber, an FBI undercover informant, before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1950, Logan was listed as a Communist sympathizer in the infamous Red Channels, an anti-communist document which stamped people in the entertainment industry as supposed Communists or Communist sympathizers from 1950 until its publication was ended in 1962 by a lawsuit. Logan died of cancer at age 59 in 1969.
- March 6, 1924 – Sarah Caldwell born, American theatre impresario; in 1957, she founded the Boston Opera Group with $5,000, which became the Opera Company of Boston; she was its conductor and artistic director until 1990. She also was the second woman to conduct the New York Philharmonic in 1974, for a program of music by women composers, and in 1976, was the first woman conductor at the Metropolitan Opera, for La Traviata, starring Beverly Sills. She died of heart failure at age 82.
- March 6, 1937 – Valentina Tereshkova born, Russian cosmonaut, engineer, and General-major in the Soviet Air Force, selected as a cosmonaut because of her expert skill in parachuting. She was the first and youngest woman to fly in space, piloting Vostok 6 in 1963, and the only woman to fly on a solo space mission.
- March 6, 1941 – Dame Marilyn Strathern born, Welsh anthropologist, worked with the Mount Hagen people of Papua New Guinea; Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge (1993-2008); Mistress of Girton College (1998-2009); studied in the UK reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization; she co-authored Technologies of Procreation: Kinship in the Age of Assisted Conception.
- March 6, 1944 – Dame Kiri Te Kanawa born in New Zealand to a Māori father and a woman of Irish heritage, then adopted as an infant by Thomas and Nell Te Kanawa. An operatic lyric soprano, she performed to international acclaim at most of the world’s great opera houses from the 1960s until she announced her retirement in 2017. She moved back to New Zealand in 2021, where she established the Kiri Te Kanawa Foundation, which awards grants to young New Zealand singers and musicians.
- March 6, 1947 – Rayda Jacobs born, South African author and documentary filmmaker; noted for her novels, Eyes of the Sky, which won the 1996 Herman Charles Bosman Prize for English Fiction, The Slave Book, and Sachs Street. She also wrote the screenplay and co-directed Confessions of a Gambler, based on her novel of the same name.
- March 6, 1947 – Jean Seaton born, English historian and academic; Professor of Media History at the University of Westminster; Official Historian of the BBC, noted for her volume of the official history of the BBC, Pinkoes and Traitors: the BBC and the Nation 1970-1987; and Director of the Orwell Prize (for political writing, three prizes awarded annually: one each for outstanding Book, Journalism, and Exposing Britain’s social evils) – noted forher commentary on Orwell for BBC radio.
- March 6, 1953 – Carolyn Porco born, American astronomer; planetary scientist who studied the outer solar system; leader of the imaging science team on the Cassini mission to Saturn; expert on planetary rings and Saturn’s moon Enceladus; awarded the 2008 Isaac Asimov Science Award, 2009 Lennart Nilsson Award for photographic work, and 2010 Carl Sagan Medal for Excellence in Communication of Science to the Public.
- March 6, 1960 – In Switzerland, women finally won the right to vote in municipal elections, but they still could not vote in federal elections until 1971. Beginning in the late 1950s, Swiss women in some French-speaking cantons were able vote in local referendums. The first petition by Swiss women for political rights had been presented to the Federal Assembly in 1886.
- March 6, 1961 – Ruth Golembo born, South African financial journalist and managing director of Lange Public Relations (1995-2016); worked as investment columnist for the Business Times, the Financial Mail, and the Sunday Times.
- March 6, 2002 – The Association of Women in Mathematics, founded in 1971, begins sponsoring Sonia Kovalevsky High School Mathematics Day annually, and jointly sponsors the Sonia Kovalevsky Lecture with the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
- March 6, 2014 – UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon pledged the support of the United Nations for a UK campaign to ban Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) during a meeting with Fahma Mohamed of Integrate UK. Early in 2014, Integrate UK had launched an online petition to end the practice, which quickly gained over 250,000 signatures. Malala Yousafzai also offered her support to the campaign.
- March 6, 2016 – Honduran President Juan Hernández asked UN High Commissioner on Human Rights Zeid bin Ra’ad Al-Hussein to assist in the investigation of the murder of Berta Cáceres on March 2, 2016. The environmental activist and indigenous leader, and coordinator of the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras, was the winner of the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize, for spearheading “a grassroots campaign that successfully pressured the world’s largest dam builder to pull out of the Agua Zarca Dam” at the Río Gualcarque in Western Honduras. The river is sacred to the Lenca people, the largest indigenous group in Honduras, who depend on it for their subsistence. By 2018, David Castillo Mejía, the executive president of the company which was to build the dam which Cáceres campaigned against, was the ninth person arrested for the murder, and the fourth with ties to the Honduran military. Castillo Mejía was accused of providing logistical support and other resources to one of the hitmen already charged. He is the first person to be charged as the “intellectual author” of Cáceres’s murder and the attempted murder of Mexican environmentalist Gustavo Castro. Before her murder, Berta Cáceres told close friends and family that Castillo Mejía hounded her with texts, phone calls, and appeared without warning at her home, work events and even the airport. Five years after Berta Cáceres was murdered by hired hitmen, the US-trained ex-military officer accused of masterminding the assassination was indicted on March 2, 2016 as the “intellectual author” of her murder. He was tried and found guilty in July, 2021.
- March 6, 2019 – Former U.S. Senator Martha McSally (Republican – Arizona – 2019-2020) said a superior officer raped her during the time she served in the Air Force. She made the revelation during a Senate Armed Services subcommittee hearing on sexual assault in the military. McSally, the first U.S. woman pilot to fly a combat mission and the first to command a fighter squadron, called for reforms in the ways the Pentagon handles such cases. "Like you, I am also a military sexual assault survivor," McSally said, addressing people who had been assaulted. "But unlike so many brave survivors, I didn't report being sexually assaulted. Like so many women and men, I didn't trust the system at the time. I blamed myself … I thought I was strong but felt powerless."
- March 6, 2020 – After extensive research, Oxford University Press has quietly begun replacing hundreds of sentences used in Oxford dictionaries as examples of how to use a word which are now deemed to be sexist. Sample sentences, which are extracted from published texts, previously used for “anatomy” have been “He left dusty handprints on his lady customers’ anatomies,” and “She was unable to reach for the bag in case she revealed more of her anatomy than she already had.” These examples have been replaced by “People should never be reduced to their anatomies.” The extensive changes were prompted by a complaint in 2016 from Michael Oman-Reagan, a Canadian anthropologist, about these examples: “rabid” (“rabid feminist”), “shrill” (“the rising shrill of women’s voices”) and “nagging” (“a nagging wife”). “People were talking about stereotypes being perpetuated by example sentences. That was something we’d never considered before,” said Katherine Connor Martin, head of language content and data at OUP. “We’ve done a really extensive project looking at every example sentence that had a female pronoun in it, involving thousands and thousands of examples, looking for patterns to check if this was a valid critique.” Martin cited “Housework,” which had been illustrated with the sentence “She was doing the housework.” Martin said lexicographers struggled to find examples drawn from actual texts that were not sexist stereotypes: “it was unreal, all the examples were either ‘she was doing the housework’ or ‘he wasn’t doing the housework’, that’s so tied into the notion of housework.” They finally settled on “I was busy doing housework when the doorbell rang.”
- March 6, 2021 – The Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), a UN partner, announced that the proportion of women parliamentarians worldwide reached 25.5% in 2020 – a historic first but still far from gender parity. IPU Secretary-General Martin Chungong said, “While we celebrate and welcome this all-time high, we feel that progress is painstakingly, or even excruciatingly, slow. At the current rate, it will take another 50 years before we can achieve gender parity in parliament. And of course, we all agree that this is not tenable, it’s not acceptable.”
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- March 7, 203 AD – Vibia Perpetua, daughter of a prominent Carthaginian family and a Christian convert; the first diarist noted in history who kept a record of her time waiting in a Roman prison under sentence of death, with her pregnant slave Felicitas. She wrote down her thoughts, her dreams and nightmares, and an argument with her father, who wanted her to renounce her faith.
- March 7, 1873 – Madame Sul-Te-Wan born as Nellie Crawford to parents who were freed slaves; American stage, screen and television actor; performances from Intolerance to Carmen Jones, The Buccaneer, and the TV series Medic, her career spanned over 50 years; she was the first African American actor to sign a film contract, and the first to be a featured performer.
- March 7, 1875 – Mary Teresa Norton born, American politician, labor and women’s rights advocate, the first Democratic woman to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives, representing New Jersey’s 13th District (1933-1951).
- March 7, 1893 – Lorena A. Hickok born, American journalist and author, New York Daily Mirror and AP reporter, one of the few women to have a byline in the 1920s, becoming nationally known; numerous interviews with Eleanor Roosevelt led to close friendship – ‘Hick’ encouraged the First Lady to write her “My Day” newspaper column – during the Great Depression, Hickok worked as the Federal Emergency Relief Administration’s chief investigator.
- March 7, 1894 – Ana María O’Neill born, Puerto Rican scholar and women’s rights activist; the first woman professor in the Department of Commerce at the University of Puerto Rico (1929-1951). O’Neill was also an active supporter of Puerto Rico’s Cooperative Movement, a grassroots effort to create cooperative-run enterprises for food and goods retailing, agriculture, housing, transportation, and banking. She founded the Cooperative Institute of the University of Puerto Rico. O’Neill is the author of Ética Para la Era Atómica (Ethics for the Atomic Age) and Psicología de la Comunicación (Psychology of Communication).
- March 7, 1903 – Maud Lewis born, Canadian folk artist from Nova Scotia. After living in poverty most of her life, she came to national attention in 1964 when the Star Weekly in Toronto published an article about her. The White House ordered two of her paintings in the 1970s during Richard Nixon’s presidency. Her small paintings, which sold for two or three dollars in the 1950s, now sell in the $5,000-$20,000 range. Sadly, she was so crippled with arthritis by the time she was “discovered,” she couldn’t produce many of her paintings in the late 1960s which would have sold for far greater sums than her earlier work. She died in 1970, and her husband Everett was killed in an attempted robbery of their home in 1979. The house began to deteriorate. In 1984, the house, which had been painted by Lewis as an ongoing art project, was sold to the Province of Nova Scotia and turned over to the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. In 1996, funds from the federal Department of Canadian Heritage and from private individuals were used to restore and preserve the house. It is now on permanent display in Halifax at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. The gallery’s gift shop sells children’s books illustrated with Maude Lewis paintings.
- March 7, 1906 – Women in Finland win the right to vote for women age 24 and older. The League of Working Women, founded in 1900, campaigned for suffrage for all women, while most Finnish bourgeois women just wanted the same wealth requirements that applied to men to be extended to them. Neither group made much progress. In 1904, a mass strike of women workers at the Voikkaa paper mill empowered working women to shout down the bourgeois speakers at a November Helsinki women’s suffrage meeting , and boosted their cause. In December 1905, a “National Women’s Declaration” was read at demonstrations across Finland in which over 22,000 women took part.
- March 7, 1908 – Cincinnati’s Mayor Leopold Markbreit announces before the city council that “Women are not physically fit to operate automobiles.” He is not re-elected.
- March 7, 1917 – Janet Collins born, African American pioneer in classical ballet; dancer, choreographer, and teacher; at age 16, she auditioned for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, but refused the offer to join the company because she would have been required to paint her skin white to perform. She moved to New York in 1948, and began performing as a featured dancer in Broadway Musicals, then broke the color barrier as the first black ballet dancer to perform at the Metropolitan Opera, but could not go on tour with the company in the American Deep South, where her roles were danced by white understudies. She was the first African American dancer hired full-time for the Metropolitan Opera Ballet in 1951. Singer Marian Anderson was signed shortly before Collins, but did not perform at the Met until 1955. In 2007, the Janet Collins Fellowship was created to encourage talented black ballet dancers.
- March 7, 1917 – Betty Holberton born, one of the six original programmers of ENIAC; inventor of breakpoints in computer debugging; recipient of the 1997 Augusta Ada Lovelace Award and the 1997 IEEE Computer Pioneer Award, for developing the sort-merge generator.
- March 7, 1920 – Katherine Siva Saubell born, Native American scholar, Cahuilla tribal leader, author, and activist committed to preserving Cahuilla history, culture, especially the Cahuilla language; one of the last fluent speakers of the Cahuilla language, Saubel worked with linguists and anthropologists on a Cahuilla dictionary and grammar book, historical accounts, and studies of medicinal plants used in traditional Cahuilla medicine; in 1964, she helped launch the Malki Museum, the first nonprofit museum founded and managed by Native Americans on a reservation.
- March 7, 1922 – Olga Aleksandrovna Ladyzhenskaya born, Russian mathematician, known for her work in partial differential equations and fluid dynamics, and the finite difference method for the Navier–Stokes equations. She received the Lomonosov Gold Medal in 2002, and published over 200 scientific works.
- March 7, 1938 – Janet Guthrie born, pioneering woman auto racer, the first woman to compete in the Indianapolis 500 and Daytona 500, both in 1977.
- March 7, 1940 – Hannah Wilke born, artist, focused on works that celebrated female sexual pleasures; she later documented the ravages of treatment of aggressive cancer while dying.
- March 7, 1945 – Elizabeth Moon born, American science fiction and fantasy author, newspaper columnist, and former computer specialist in the U.S. Marine Corps. Moon’s short stories began appearing regularly in Analog magazine in 1986, and her debut novel, The Sheepfarmer’s Daughter, was published in 1988. Her 2003 novel, The Speed of Dark, won the 2003 Nebula Award, and the 2007 Robert A. Heinlein Award for “hard science or technical writings that inspire the human exploration of space.”
- March 7, 1954 – Eva Brunne born, first openly lesbian Church of Sweden priest to be elected as bishop and first bishop living in registered homosexual partnership; Bishop of Stockholm since 2009.
- March 7, 1964 – Wanda Sykes born, African American comedian, writer, and actor; activist for LGBTQ rights, in support of at-risk and runaway teens, and against chaining dogs.
- March 7, 1978 – Jaqueline Gomes de Jesus born, Brazilian psychologist, writer, and anti-discrimination activist. She is an advocate for human rights for all races and sexual orientations, and was one of the organizers of Brasilia’s LGBT Pride Parade. Gomes de Jesus was a speaker at the opening of Brazil’s 5th National Conference on Human Rights. In 2000, with activist Luiz Mott, she co-founded Associação Brasileira de Lésbicas, Gays, Bissexuais, Travestis, Transexuais e Intersexos (Brazilian Association of Lesbians Gays, Bisexuals, Transvestites, Transsexuals, and Intersexuals), and served as the ABGLT’s General Secretary.
- March 7, 2010 – Kathryn Bigelow becomes the first woman to win an Academy Award for Best Director for her Iraq War film “The Hurt Locker,” which won six Oscars, including Best Picture.
- March 7, 2018 – In Belgium, a Brussels criminal court handed down a fine of €3,000 (over $3800 USD) for verbal abuse of a woman police officer by a man she pulled over for a highway code violation. He was the first person convicted under a law that criminalises sexism in a public place. It was put on the Belgium statute books in 2014 following an outcry when film student Sofie Peeters’s final school project, Femme de la Rue (Street Woman) was shown on Belgian television. The documentary, made with a hidden camera, recorded the street harassment she and other women she knew experienced on a daily basis. The harassment was so unrelenting that most of the young women never went out wearing a skirt, dress, or shorts. They avoided the metro, never made eye contact with men, avoided walking along certain streets, and in one case, only left home by bicycle. "The first question women ask is: 'Is it me? Is it something I have done, is it my clothes?' But when I made this film I saw it wasn't just me, lots of women have this problem," Peeters told Belgian TV. After the film was shown in France, a Frenchman claimed in a tweet that he had never seen anyone complain of similar street harassment, so the Brussels story must be an isolated case. Under the hashtags #harcelementderue (street harassment) and #harcelementdemetro (metro harassment), hundreds of Frenchwomen proved him wrong by relating their experiences. The French feminist group Osez Le Feminisme praised the film for triggering debate on the issue, and a poll in London found that four in ten young women were sexually harassed during 2017.
- March 7, 2020 – Dalilah Loza, age 15, had never taken part in a political protest. But when Mexican feminists hit the streets on Valentine’s Day to denounce their country’s worsening femicide crisis, she saw a chance to ensure her mother’s life and death were remembered. “I’m the only one who can speak for her now. I’m her daughter. I’m the only one who really cares,” said the teenager, whose 33-year-old mother was stabbed to death by her boyfriend at their home in Tijuana last September, in front of Dalilah and her baby brother. Flanked by scores of mostly young female demonstrators, Dalilah marched on the attorney general’s office clutching a homemade placard with her mother’s picture and the message: “I miss you, mummy.” Her mother’s death was one of the over 1,000 murders classified by authorities as femicides in 2019, many of them remaining unsolved. In 2015, there were 425 murders classified as femicides. With the violence still rising, a new generation of Mexican feminists have mobilized, using increasingly radical tactics. They staged rallies all over Mexico on the weekend, a prelude to a 24-hour women’s strike on Monday, March 9, all related to International Women’s Day. Thousands of Mexican women stayed home during the strike. Carolina Barrales, one of the founders of Circulo Violeta (Violet Circle), a Tijuana-based feminist collective, said, “In Circulo Violeta, we believe in smashing whatever needs to be smashed, shouting whatever you need to shout, doing whatever you need to do.” She adds, “We aren’t vandals . . . but we do support this form of protest. It’s our last resort – and the last resort that they have left us. We shout and shout and nothing happens.”
- March 7, 2021 – In the UK, the Observer newspaper launched a campaign in conjunction with Karen Ingala Smith and Clarrie O’Callaghan, creators of the unique Femicide Census, to address the femicide crisis. In November, 2020, the Femicide Census published a 10-year study, titled “If I’m not in on Friday I might be dead.” The words are from Judith Nibbs, who was beheaded by her husband of 30 years, Dempsey Nibbs. The census shows a woman was killed every three days throughout the decade in the UK. Domestic abuse costs £66bn a year in England and Wales. Since 2016, recorded domestic abuse-related crimes have increased by 63%. The government promised an extra £19m to tackle violence against women and girls, but Women’s Aid calculated that £393m is required to provide sustainable services. Some progress has been made. In 2019, Nicole Jacobs was appointed as the first Domestic Abuse Commissioner for England and Wales. On April 29, 2021, a domestic abuse bill was passed and signed into law. Among its measures are a new statutory definition of domestic abuse that includes economic abuse, and measures that outlaw non-fatal strangulation, the “rough sex” defence, and post-separation abuse.
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- March 8, 1518 – Sidonie of Saxony born; in 1545, she was married at the age of 27 to Duke Eric II of Brunswick-Lüneburg, who was 10 years her junior. Two years into the marriage Duke Eric, who had been converted by his mother while a minor from Catholicism to Protestantism, re-converted to Catholicism, and tried to get Sidonie to also convert, but she held on to her Lutheran faith. The strain in the marriage was made much worse by their lack of offspring and financial troubles. Sidonie’s brother was told by a merchant that Duke Eric had ordered poison from him. When Eric moved into Calenberg Castle with his mistress in 1563, Sidonie was refused access to the castle. By 1564, she was under virtual house arrest, which she protested vigorously to her brother Maurice, Elector of Saxony, and Holy Roman Emperor Maximillian II. Eric fell ill that year, and suspected he had been poisoned, so four women in Neustadt am Rübenberge were burned at the stake as witches. In 1570, mediation by the Emperor and her brother resulted in a settlement in which Sidonie would receive Calenberg Castle, but Eric didn’t abide by the settlement. In 1572, Eric assembled some advisors, nobles and deputies from Hannover and Hameln, and accused Sidonie of witchcraft and making an attempt on his life, presenting “evidence” obtained by torture from the women executed for witchcraft. Sidonie left the castle secretly and fled to Vienna, asking Emperor Maxillian for his help. He decreed that an investigation would be carried out at the imperial court, but turned the case over to Dukes of Brunswick-Lüneburg and nearby Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. In December 1573, the case was presented in Halberstadt before a large audience. On January 1, 1574, Sidonie was acquitted of all charges. She finally received some compensation and a pension for life, but she died in 1575, at age 56, leaving significant sums of money to her negotiators at the trial.
- March 8, 1702 – England’s Queen Anne becomes Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland upon the death of King William III. She rules from 1702 until her death in 1714 at the age of 49, worn out by 17 pregnancies, with no surviving issue. Succeeded by her second cousin, George I of the House of Hanover, her closest relative who was not a Catholic.
- March 8, 1839 – Josephine G. Cochran born, American inventor of first commercially successful automatic dishwasher, constructed with mechanic George Butters; received her patent in 1886, and attracted much attention when she showed her invention at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. She began manufacturing the units in 1897, selling them to restaurants and hotels. By 1940, her company had evolved into Kitchen Aid, a division of the Whirlpool Corporation.
- March 8, 1892 – Juana de Ibarbourou born, Uruguayan feminist poet who used nature imagery and eroticism; at age 17, she published Derechos femeninos (Women’s Rights), a prose work.
- March 8, 1894 – Dorothy Sears Ainsworth born, American women’s physical education pioneer, professor and director of physical education at Smith College (1926-1960), and internationally known authority on physical education for women. She believed that sports are healthy and develop the values, skills, and character required in a democratic society. Ainsworth chaired the U.S. Joint Council on International Affairs in Health, Physical Education and Recreation (1950-1957).
- March 8, 1896 – Charlotte Whitton born, Canadian feminist, journalist, and Progressive Conservative politician; first woman mayor of Ottawa (1951-1956 and 1960-1964).
- March 8, 1902 – Louise Beavers born, African American film and television actor, who struggled to overcome the stereotypical roles in which she was cast; spoke in support of political candidates she believed would help advance the civil rights cause.
- March 8, 1907 – A month after the United Procession of Women, dubbed the “Mud March,” in which over 3,000 women participated, the British House of Commons turns down a woman suffrage bill. In 1880, women freeholders on the Isle of Man had won the vote; by 1903, though there was a majority of support for suffrage in parliament, the ruling Liberal Party refused to allow a vote on the issue; some British women over the age of 30 did get the vote in 1918. The Representation of the People Act 1928 finally extended the franchise to British women on the same basis as British men.
- March 8, 1909 – Beatrice ‘Tilly’ Shilling born, British aeronautical engineer, motorcycle and auto racer; at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, invents ‘Miss Shilling’s orifice,’ fixing a serious problem with the WWII Rolls-Royce Merlin engines in Hawker Hurricanes and some Spitfire fighters that lost power or even completely cut-out during certain maneuvers while in combat.
- March 8, 1910 – Baroness de Laroche becomes the first Frenchwoman to earn a pilot's license.
- March 8, 1910 – Alphonse XIII, King of Spain, authorizes Spanish women to attend universities. María Goyri de Menéndez Pidal was actually the first Spanish woman to earn a degree in 1896, and the first to earn her doctorate in 1909, but she had to get permission from the General Secretary of Public Instruction to register officially as a female student in order to attend classes, on the condition that her presence not distract male students. Prior to each class she was not permitted to wait in the corridor and had to wait in an office adjacent to her classroom. Her professor would then escort her to her own individual desk near his. At the end of class she was escorted out the same way. After the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), teachers were forbidden to promote women's equality in education and other liberal causes. Spanish women were effectively stripped of citizenship, and were banned from most occupations outside the home. The only jobs open to women which required a university education were nursing and teaching. A conservative Catholic curriculum implemented in public schools indoctrinated girls to only aspire to be wives and mothers, and to support “traditional Spanish values” as defined by the Franco regime.
- March 8, 1910 – At the Second International conference of Women in Copenhagen, German Socialist Luise Zietz and Clara Zetkin, head of the Women’s Office for the German Social Democratic Party, inspired by the events in the U.S., propose an International Women’s Day (the first Woman’s Day was launched on February 28, 1909, in the United States; Charlotte Perkins Gilman addressed a crowd in New York City, proclaiming, “It is true that a woman’s duty is centered in her home and motherhood but home should mean the whole country and not be confined to three or four rooms of a city or a state.”)
- March 8, 1913 – International Women’s Day is celebrated for the first time on March 8, mostly in European countries. It had first been celebrated on March 19 in 1911, the day in 1848 the King of Prussia had promised to introduce votes for women, but that promise was never fulfilled. The UN General Assembly invited member states to proclaim March 8 as International Women’s Day in 1977. It is now a Public Holiday in Abkhazia, Angola, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, China (for women only), Eritrea, Georgia, Guinea-Bissau, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyyztan, Laos, Madagascar (for women only), Moldova, Mongolia, Nauru, Nepal (for women only), North Korea, Russia, Sierra Leone, Tajikistan, Transdniestria, Turkmenistan, Uganda, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, and Zambia. In Bulgaria, March 8 is Mother’s Day.
- March 8, 1915 – Selma Fraiberg born, American child psychoanalyst, social worker, and author. She pioneered groundbreaking studies of infant psychiatry and normal child development, as well as studies of infants with congenital blindness. She directed the Child Development Project at Wayne State University (1952-1958). Fraiberg wrote The Magic Years: Understanding and Handling the Problems of Early Childhood (1959), a classic which has been translated into ten languages.
- March 8, 1923 – Ruth Lyttle Satter born, American botanist, plant physiologist, chronobiologist, and mathematician; best known for her work on circadian leaf movement; worked at Bell Laboratories (1944-1947); earned her PhD in Botany in 1968; active in the American Institute of Biological Sciences, the American Society of Plant Physiology, and the Association for Women in Science (AWIS); a supporter of opportunities for women in science, in her will, she set up an award for women re-entering the sciences after a break in their education to raise a family. She died in 1989 from leukemia. The Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in mathematics was established by American Mathematical Society in 1990.
- March 8, 1939 – Lynn Seymour born in Canada as Berta Lynn Springbett; ballerina and choreographer at the Royal Ballet, and prima ballerina at the Berlin Opera Ballet; sometimes partnered with Rudolf Nureyev; artistic director of Munich State Ballet (1978-1980) and the Greek National Ballet (2006-2007).
- March 8, 1940 – Leni Sinclair born as Magdalene Arndt, American photographer and radical left political activist; she photographed rock and jazz musicians in the early 1960s. She was part of the Detroit Artists Workshop, and co-founder in 1968 with John Sinclair and Pun Plamondon of the White Panther Party, an anti-racist collective which worked with many ethnic minority rights groups in the Rainbow Coalition.
- March 8, 1945 – Lilia Ann Abron born, American entrepreneur and chemical engineer; in 1972, she was the first African American woman to earn a PhD in chemical engineering; founder and CEO of PEER Consultants, engineering solutions to protect populations from adverse environmental factors, while protecting the environment by reducing human impact.
- March 8, 1945 – Phyllis Mae Daley receives a commission in the U.S. Navy Nurse Corps; she was the first African-American nurse to serve on active duty in World War II.
- March 8, 1945 – Sylvia Wiegand born in South Africa, American mathematician in the fields of commutative algebra, and history of mathematics; president of the Association for Women in Mathematics (1997-2000). For 17 years she was the only woman in the University of Nebraska's math department; by 2018, about 25% of the math faculty were women. In 2012, she became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society, and in 2017, she was selected as a fellow of the Association for Women in Mathematics in the inaugural class.
- March 8, 1948 – McCollum v. Board of Education: Vashti McCollum, an atheist, objected when her son James was ostracized for not attending religious classes and sued the school board. She said students are coerced by school officials to attend the “voluntary” classes, and the Champaign Council on Religious Education, which started the program, selected its instructors, and determined which religious faiths participated in the program, had too much power, constituting a prior censorship of religion. The U.S. Supreme Court reversed a lower court ruling, and by 8-1 declared religious instruction during “released time” within school hours at tax-supported public school facilities was not constitutional.
- March 8, 1951 – Monica Helms born, transgender activist, author, and veteran of the United States Navy, creator of the Transgender Pride Flag.
- March 8, 1961 – Camryn Manheim born, American actress, writer, and theatre producer, best known for her role in the television series The Practice; noted for her Off-Broadway one-woman show, Wake Up, I’m Fat, and her book of the same name. She is the co-chair of the Justice Ball, the annual fundraiser for Bet Tzedek Legal Services, a leading non-profit legal center for social justice, civil rights, and protection of the rights of people living in poverty.
- March 8, 1966 – Jaime Levy born, American author, interface designer, user experience strategist, and lecturer; a pioneer in software design and information technology. Her career began in 1990 with the creation of the electronic magazines, Cyber Rag and Electronic Hollywood, and in 1993, the first commercially released interactive press kit for EMI Records, to market Billy Idol’s Cyberpunk CD. In 1994, she worked for IBM in interface design, and also hosted “CyberSlacker” salons for programmers and animators, then moved in 1995 to Icon CMT, as a creative director, launching the online magazine WORD. She became an independent consultant, designing Malice Palace, a multi-user environment, and the CyberSlacker cartoon series, then founded JLR Interactive in 2010.
- March 8, 1972 – Lena Kyoung Ran Sundström, born in South Korea, found on orphanage steps, adopted by her Swedish family; journalist, columnist, author, and documentary filmmaker; in 2009, Sundström’s book on Denmark’s tough immigration policy, Världens lyckligaste folk (The World’s Happiest People), became her first documentary film. Her second documentary, Dom kallas rasister (They Are Called Racists), was broadcast on Swedish television in 2013.
- March 8, 1973 – Jahana Hayes born, African American Democratic politician, and high school government and history teacher. In 2016, Hayes was recognized as the National Teacher of the Year. She was served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for Connecticut since 2019, the first black woman and first African American Democrat elected to the U.S House from Connecticut.
- March 8, 1978 – In California, the Education Task Force of the Sonoma County Commission on the Status of Women holds a “Women’s History Week” celebration, during the week of March 8th, International Women’s Day. Local activities met with enthusiastic response, and dozens of schools planned special programs. Over one hundred community women participated by doing special presentations in classrooms throughout the county, and the first annual “Real Woman” Essay Contest drew hundreds of entries. The finale for this Women’s History Week was a celebratory parade and program held in the center of downtown Santa Rosa, California. In 1979, Molly Murphy MacGregor, one of the Sonoma organizers, spoke of their success at the Women’s History Institute at Sarah Lawrence College, chaired by noted historian Gerda Lerner, who invited national leaders of organizations for women and girls to a conference. When the participants learned about the impact of Sonoma County’s Women’s History Week celebration, they decided to start similar celebrations within their own organizations, communities, and school districts. They also agreed to support an effort to secure a “National Women’s History Week,” which has since expanded into the Women’s History Month now being celebrated.
- March 8, 1998 – Girls Write Now Day is launched by Girls Write Now Inc, a New York City mentoring program which matches inner city high school girls with professional women writers and media makers; their exceptional success rate means almost all of the girls in the program graduate from high school and go to college, over half of them with scholarships or awards.
- March 8, 2014 – Women’s Collaboration Brew Day is started by Sophie de Ronde of Project Venus, who joined forces with members of the Pink Boots Society to raise awareness of women in the brewing industry. Women brewmasters around the world brew the same recipe of craft beer. The Pink Boots Society is non-profit organization which supports women in the brewing industry, helping match up members with mentors to further their education and learn the skill needs to be beer judges.
- March 8, 2017 – ‘A Day Without a Woman’ strike in protest against policies that are sexist, racist, and heterocentric. Thousands of women across the globe in 400 cities and over 50 countries participated, particularly in Poland. There were also large demonstrations in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and many schools in Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland, and Washington DC were closed because so many teachers took the day off. Providence RI’s municipal court was forced to close because so many women employees weren’t at work.
- March 8, 2018 – Women held strikes and large demonstrations around the world calling for gender equality and empowerment to mark International Women's Day. Spanish women launched a 24-hour strike against gender violence and the wage gap, while demonstrators filled streets in such cities as New Delhi and Seoul. This year's annual event was energized by the recent #MeToo and Time's Up movements, which have raised awareness of rampant sexual harassment and assault across all industries. Margrethe Vestager, the European competition commissioner, tweeted a call for women and men alike to "engage," saying, "We need power to make equality a reality." Farida Nabourema, a rights advocate from the West African nation of Togo, tweeted her support for all women activists "being abusively detained by dictatorial governments."
- March 8, 2018 – Mississippi's House approved the Gestational Age Act, seeking to bar women from having abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, with no exceptions for rape or incest, the most restrictive such ban in the U.S. at the time. Republican Governor Phil Bryant signed it into law: "I want Mississippi to be the safest place in America for an unborn child." Abortion-rights groups denounced the bill, and the Jackson Women’s Health Clinic, Mississippi's lone remaining abortion provider, immediately asked the courts to block it, noting that courts had never upheld a law barring abortions before the 20-week viability marker, when fetus could possibly survive outside the uterus. "We certainly think this bill is unconstitutional," said Katherine Klein, equality advocacy coordinator for the ACLU of Mississippi. A federal district judge blocked the law, and a federal appeals court agreed with his ruling, but the U.S. Supreme Court’s extreme right majority overturned Roe v. Wade.
- March 8, 2020 – Women asylum seekers at the border between Greece and Turkey staged a demonstration, demanding to be let into the European Union – one of many protests around the world on International Women’s Day. The women, many with children, held up signs saying “Help Us” and “Don’t Kill Us – we Are Human.” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan decided to open the Turkish side of the border. A demonstration in Kyrgyzstan also turned violent as police detained dozens of protesters – mainly women – after masked men attacked them and tore up their placards in the capital Bishkek. A police spokesman said they were detained for their own safety and because police had not been warned about the rally. In Santiago, Chile, thousands gathered in the capital, Santiago, demanding access to abortion, and an end to violence against women. Police used water hoses and teargas in attempts to disperse crowds. Many Chilean women came prepared, wearing gas masks and even sling shots to fight back. In the Philippines, a group of anti-imperialists, dissidents and feminists burnt an effigy of President Rodrigo Duterte, who has been criticised for misogyny. In London, 31 women from the Extinction Rebellion group formed a topless chain across Waterloo Bridge, saying their bare breasts symbolised “the vulnerability of women around the world in the face of climate breakdown.” In Paris, topless feminists with slogans and symbols painted on their upper bodies chanted, “Who’s doing the washing up? We are making a revolution” in the Place de la Concorde, wearing protective glasses and masks while protesting “the patriarchal pandemic.”
- March 8, 2021 – J. Mark Ramseyer, a professor of Japanese legal studies at Harvard Law School, sparked outrage among fellow academics and campaigners after claiming that Korean and Chinese women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military were instead sex workers who voluntarily entered into contracts to work in wartime brothels – a claim by Japanese ultra-conservatives trying to whitewash Japan’s wartime atrocities. His academic paper, published online late in 2020, titled “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War,” was due to appear in the March issue of the International Review of Law and Economics. The issue has been suspended as Ramseyer’s claim that the widely accepted account of the “comfort women” system was “pure fiction” has come under increasing scrutiny. The journal issued an “expression of concern” and said the piece was under investigation. Harvard historians Andrew Gordon and Carter Eckert are among the prominent academics who challenged Ramseyer’s research, as they had found no evidence of the contracts he described in his article, and called for the original article to be retracted. “We do not see how Ramseyer can make credible claims, in extremely emphatic wording, about contracts he has not read,” they said in a statement.” A U.S. State Department spokesperson said, “As the United States has stated many times, the trafficking of women for sexual purposes by the Japanese military during World War II was an egregious violation of human rights.”
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The Feminist Cats Learn Women’s History Online
In the early 20th century, cats were often used in anti-suffrage ads, either to portray women as simple and delicate creatures who needed pampering, or to show men being stuck at home doing “women’s work” – like scrubbing clothes and taking care of the baby – while a cat looks on, because his wife is a “suffragette” – a not-so-subtle reminder that witches were women, and cats, especially black cats, were their familiars.
In the spring of 1916, New York suffragists Nell Richardson and Alice Burke began a coast-to-coast speaking tour, traveling in a two-seater car they called “The Golden Flier.” Along the way, they adopted a little black kitten as their mascot, naming him Saxon after the manufacturer of their car. They spent long hours standing on street corners and in public parks making speeches about the importance of the vote for women. Alice Burke commented they were in the sun so much their noses “would blister and burn” and their “hair sizzle.” Saxon also suffered from the heat, and often hid under whatever cover was available, with only “a pink nose and a youthful whisker” showing.
Saxon became the new, pro-suffrage image of cats – mascot and companion of two strong, independent women who tirelessly spoke for the rights of American women as citizens to vote.
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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: