WOW2 is a four-times-a-month sister blog to This Week in the War on Women. This edition covers trailblazing women and events from March 9 through 16.
The next WOW2 edition will post
on Saturday, March 19, 2022.
The purpose of WOW2 is to learn about and honor women of achievement, including many who’ve been ignored or marginalized in most of the history books, and to mark moments in women’s history. It also serves as a reference archive of women’s history. There are so many more phenomenal women than I ever dreamed of finding, and all too often their stories are almost unknown, even to feminists and scholars.
March is National Women’s History Month
THIS WEEK IN THE WAR ON WOMEN
will post shortly, so be sure to go there next, and
catch up on the latest dispatches from the frontlines.
Many thanks to libera nos, intrepid Assistant Editor of WOW2. Any remaining mistakes are either mine, or uncaught computer glitches in transferring the data from his emails to DK5. And thanks to wow2lib, WOW2’s Librarian Emeritus.
These trailblazers have a lot to teach us about persistence in the face of overwhelming odds. I hope you will find reclaiming our past as much of an inspiration as I do.
Trailblazing Women and Events in Our History
Note: All images and audios are below the person or event to which they refer
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- March 9, 1697 – Friederike Caroline Neuber born, influential German actress, actor-manager and theatre director; one of the most famous actor-managers in German theatre history, a pioneer who worked successfully to improve the social and artistic status of German theatrical performers. She also introduced many classical French plays to German audiences. Founder of the Neuber Theatrical Troupe in 1727 with her husband, Johann Neuber, nurturing the modern naturalistic style of acting, and training many of the next generation of actor-managers. The city of Leipzig inaugurated the Caroline Neuber Prize in 1998, endowed with €6,000, awarded every two years on her birthday to a woman theatre artist from a German-speaking country who has set new standards for excellence in theatre arts.
- March 9, 1863 – Mary Harris Armor born, American suffragist and temperance advocate, dubbed the “Georgia Cyclone.” She was the president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in Georgia, and led the successful campaign in her state to pass prohibition legislation in 1907. However, there was a terrible racist bias in her WCTU campaign – she used the slogan “Shall the Blacks Rule the Whites?”
- March 9, 1892 – Vita Sackville-West born, English novelist, poet, journalist, and garden designer. Portrait of a Marriage, a memoir of her love life, including her marriage to Harold Nicolson and her relationship with Violet Keppel, wasn’t published until 1973. Her novel All Passions Spent was a best-seller in 1931, and is probably her best-known work today.
- March 9, 1900 – German women petition the Reichstag for right to take university entrance exams.
- March 9, 1910 – Sue Lee born, American labor organizer in San Francisco helped form the first Chinese chapter of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU). She led a 15-week strike against the National Dollar Stores garment factory for better wages and working conditions. Her story was featured in Unbound Voices: A Documentary History of Chinese Women in San Francisco.
- March 9, 1911 – Clara Reisenberg Rockmore born, Lithuanian violin prodigy and virtuoso Theremin player; her classical violin studies began when she was a toddler, and she was the youngest student at the Saint Petersburg Conservation at age four. She moved with her family to the U.S. in 1921. As a teenager, she gave up the violin because tendinitis affected her bow arm. She met Léon Theremin, and became the most prominent player of his electronic instrument, the Theremin. Her performances and experience helped him refine the instrument. In 1977, she recorded The Art of the Theremin, which was produced by Bob and Shirleigh Moog, and her sister Nadia accompanied her on the piano. She died at age 87 in 1998.
- March 9, 1928 – Graciela Olivarez born, American lawyer and civil rights activist; the first woman and first Latina graduate from Notre Dame Law School, one of the first two women on the board of Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), and Director of the Community Services Administration under President Jimmy Carter (1977-1980). The Graciela Olivarez Award is presented annually by the Notre Dame Hispanic Law Students Association.
- March 9, 1936 – Glenda Jackson born, British two-time Academy-Award-winning actor, who turned to politics, becoming a Member of Parliament for Hampstead and Highgate (1992-2010), later reconfigured as Hampstead and Kilburn (2010-2015).
- March 9, 1948 – Emma Bonino born, Italian politician, Minister of Foreign Affairs (2013-2014); Member of the Italian Senate (2008 -2013); Minister of European Affairs and International Trade (2006-2008); European Commissioner for Health and Consumer Protection (1995-1999); member of the European Parliament (1979-1999); Italian Chamber of Deputies (1976- 2006). In 1975, she founded the Information Centre on Sterilisation and Abortion, and campaigned for the referendum which led to the legalization of abortion in Italy. In 1986, she opposed a civil nuclear energy programme, which was rejected in Italy. She won the North-South Prize in 1999, and in 2004, the Open Society Prize and the Prix Femmes d'Europe for Italy.
- March 9, 1951 – Helen Zille born, South African politician; Chair of the Federal Council of the Democratic Alliance since 2019; Premier of the West Cape province (2009-2019); Democratic Alliance leader (2007-2015); mayor of Cape Town (2006-2009); member of the anti-apartheid groups Black Sash, a non-violent white women’s resistance organization, and the End Conscription Campaign (allied with the United Democratic Front); her home became a safe house for political activists during the 1986 State of Emergency; she was forced for a short time into hiding with her 2-year-old son; later, she was part of the South Africa Beyond Apartheid Project and the Cape Town Peace Committee, but then got into hot water for saying that the legacy of infrastructure and institutions left behind was a positive aspect of colonialism.
- March 9, 1957 – Mona Sahlin born, Swedish Social Democratic politician, the first woman to chair the party (2007-2011); member of the Riksdag, Sweden’s parliament, elected in 1982 as the youngest member at that time, she served from 1982 to 1991, then represented Stockholm County from 2002 to 2011; chair of the European Council Against Racism (1997-1998).
- March 9, 1957 – Mattel introduces Barbie, the misogynist’s wet-dream doll with deformed feet, at the annual Toy Fair in New York.
- March 9, 1964 – Juliette Binoche born, French actress and human rights campaigner; made her English-language film debut in 1988’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, won the 1996 Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for The English Patient, and was nominated in 2001 for Best Actress in a Leading Role for Chocolat. Since 1992, Binoche has been a patron of the charity Enfants d'Asie, supporting Cambodian orphans, and funded construction of a children’s home. Also involved with Reporters Without Borders since 2006. At the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, Binoche spoke out against the detention of Iranian director Jafar Panahi, incarcerated in Tehran's Evin Prison without charge.
- March 9, 1986 – Brittany Snow born, American actress, producer, and director, known for Hairspray (2007 remake), the Pitch Perfect films, and Hangman. She wrote and directed the short film Milkshake in 2019, and won a Human Rights Ally Award for Love is Louder, a project she co-created to address bullying, body image discrimination, and mental health issues. Also a supporter of several charities, including Clothes Off Our Back, Feeding America, Habitat for Humanity, the Red Cross, and The Trevor Project.
- March 9, 1989 – The U.S. Senate rejected John Tower, 53-47, President Bush’s choice for Secretary of Defense, the first rejection in 30 years, amid misconduct allegations, including problems with drinking and harassing women, and possible conflicts of interest. Nancy Kassebaum, the lone Republican who voted against Tower, said: ''If we are going to have a strong defense force, which consists of both men and women, we are going to have to insure fairness. I am not confident that Senator Tower would give these issues the priority they demand or would demonstrate the necessary sensitivity to their seriousness.''
- March 9, 1990 – Dr. Antonia Novello was sworn in as the first woman and first Hispanic U.S. Surgeon General.
- March 9, 2016 – Insiders say Sony Music would end its relationship with producer Dr. Luke, after facing sharp criticism since Dr. Luke (his real name is Lukasz Gottwald) was accused publicly of sexually abusing pop star Kesha, who went to court in an effort to be released from the contract that had her working for Dr. Luke, but was denied. In 2014, Kesha came forward, accusing him of forcing her to take a date-rape drug and then taking advantage of her in a hotel room. Sony severed ties in April 2017, announcing that he was no longer CEO of Sony’s Kemosabe Records, established in 2011, confirmed by court papers. His access to company asserts was revoked, and he no longer had authority to act on its behalf. A page devoted to Dr. Luke on Sony Music's website was taken down.
- March 9, 2020 – Dorothy Byrne, whose career in British broadcasting has spanned over four decades, announced she was stepping down as the head of News and Current Affairs at Channel 4. On May 1, 2020, she became Channel 4’s Editor-at-Large, a role newly created especially for her. In 2019, she memorably delivered the MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival, attacking TV industry sexism, lambasting politicians for lying, and stressing TV’s part in preserving democracy. During her tenure, her department produced several outstanding documentaries, including Leaving Neverland, about the Michael Jackson investigation, and For Sama, about the war in Syria, which was nominated for an Oscar. Byrne said: “The last year has been one of great success for Channel 4 News and Current Affairs and for me personally so it’s the perfect time for me to step aside and give someone else the pleasure of the best job in television. I will continue to contribute to the creative life of the channel. I am also very excited to be working to help develop the careers of staff, particularly of women, at the channel and also to be playing a key role in the creation of a new sustainability policy for Channel 4.”
- March 9, 2021 – Naomi Mata’afa became leader of the Fa'atuatua i le Atua Samoa ua Tasi (FAST) party, the High Chiefess (malai) of Samoa. In May, 2021, she became the first woman Prime Minister of Samoa.
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- March 10, 1841 – Ina Coolbrith born, American poet, author, and librarian. She was the first Poet Laureate (1915-1928) of the state of California.
- March 10, 1844 – Marie Euphrosyne Spartali born, daughter of a Greek merchant family living in Britain, notable Pre-Raphaelite painter; when she married an American journalist, they traveled frequently to Florence and Rome, and to America, which influenced her work.
- March 10, 1847 – Kate Sheppard born in Britain, co-founder in 1885 of New Zealand’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and from 1887, leader of the woman suffrage movement. After repeated attempts to pass suffrage bills, in 1893 New Zealand became the first country in the world where women won the vote. In 1896, she was a founder and first president of the National Council of Women, campaigning for women’s right to run for Parliament, their right to divorce, to guardianship of their children, and their access to contraception. Kate Sheppard is depicted on New Zealand’s ten-dollar note, and a Sheppard Memorial was unveiled in Christchurch on the 100th anniversary of the passage of New Zealand’s women’s suffrage bill.
- March 10, 1845/49 (year uncertain) – Hallie Quinn Brown born, African-American educator, author, and civil rights activist for women and black Americans, founder of the Colored Woman’s League of Washington, D.C. which merged with the National Association of Colored Women in 1894. She was the first woman to earn a Master of Science degree from Wilberforce University, was dean of Allen University in South Carolina (1885-1887) and principal under Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Institute (1892-1893), then became a professor at Wilberforce in 1893. A notable orator, she traveled with “The Wilberforce Grand Concert Company” fundraising for the school.
- March 10, 1867 – Lillian D. Wald born, the first public health nurse in the U.S., social worker, suffragist, humanitarian and author, human rights and women’s rights activist; started a visiting nurse service in 1893, and the demand became so great that she moved the service to New York’s Henry Street Settlement House in 1895, renaming it the Henry Street Visiting Nurse Service. She was called the “Angel of Henry Street.” Wald also worked tirelessly opposing political and social corruption, and as a leader in the campaigns for revision of child labor laws, improved housing conditions in tenement districts, enactment of pure food laws, education for the mentally handicapped, and passage of enlightened immigration regulations. Wald helped to found the NAACP and the Women’s Trade Union League. After Wald died at age 73 in 1940, the nursing service continued to expand. In 1944, it became the Visiting Nurse Service of New York.
- March 10, 1876 – Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington born, American sculptor, known for animal sculptures, especially horses. The first woman artist elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
- March 10, 1881 – Jessie Boswell born, English post-impressionist painter and designer who spent most of her working life in Italy, and became an Italian citizen.
- March 10, 1885 – Tamara Karsavina born, Russian prima ballerina, a principal artist of the Imperial Russian Ballet and later of the Ballets Russes of Serge Diaghilev.
- March 10, 1898 – Josephine Groves Holloway born, American organization executive, college registrar, social worker; she founded the first unofficial Girl Scout troop for African American girls (1924), and then worked for two decades to finally get her troops recognized by the Nashville Girl Scout Council in 1942.
- March 10, 1903 – Clare Booth Luce born, American author, playwright, and politician, wrote The Women (1936), a play with an all-woman cast which is a scathing portrayal of rich society women. She was a member of the U.S. Congress (Republican-Connecticut, 1942-1946), where she criticized international aid and opposed Communism. She was the U.S. Ambassador to Italy (1953-1956), the highest diplomatic post held by a woman up to that time, and then U.S. Ambassador to Brazil (1959). In her will, she established the Clare Booth Luce Fund, providing scholarships and support at several universities for women students and junior faculty in STEM fields.
- March 10, 1914 – At London’s National Gallery, suffragette Mary Richardson slashes Diego Velázquez’s ‘Rokeby Venus’ with a meat cleaver: “I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs. Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history. Justice is an element of beauty as much as colour and outline on canvas. Mrs. Pankhurst seeks to procure justice for womanhood, and for this she is being slowly murdered by a Government of Iscariot politicians.” Emmeline Pankhurst and other members of the militant Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), while serving sentences for their activities, went on hunger strikes to protest the horrible conditions at Holloway Prison; the government resorted to violent force-feedings to prevent them from dying as martyrs.
- March 10, 1924 – In Radice v. New York, the U.S. Supreme Court upholds a New York statute “prohibiting employment of women in restaurants in large cities (cities of the first and second class) between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. held not an arbitrary and undue interference with the liberty of contract of the women and their employers, but justifiable as a health measure” – in spite of being unable to say “whether this kind of work is so substantially and especially detrimental to the health and welfare of women” or not. “The injurious consequences were thought by the Legislature to bear more heavily against women than men, and, considering their more delicate organism, there would seem to be good reason for so thinking. The fact, assuming it to be such, properly may be made the basis of legislation applicable only to women.” The court held it did not deny equal protection under the law “either (a) because it applies only to first and second class cities, or (b) because it does not apply to women employed in restaurants as singers and performers, to attendants in ladies’ cloak rooms and parlors and those employed in hotel dining rooms and kitchens, or in lunch rooms or restaurants conducted by employers solely for the benefit of their employees” – “To be violative of the Equal Protection Clause, the inequality produced by a statute must be actually and palpably unreasonable and arbitrary.”
- March 10, 1924 – Judith B. Jones born, American cookbook author, and book editor at Alfred A. Knopf; notable for rescuing The Diary of Anne Frank from the reject pile, and championing Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking; retired as a senior editor and vice president at Knopf. Her memoir, The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food, was published in 2007.
- March 10, 1932 – Marcia Field Falkender born, Baroness Falkender (1974), British Labour politician and writer; started as private secretary to Harold Wilson (1956-1964), became his political secretary and head of the political office when Wilson became leader of the Labour party and during his years as Prime Minister (1964-1970 and 1974-1976); she was a columnist for the Mail on Sunday (1983-1988), and author of Inside Number 10, and Downing Street in Perspective.
- March 10, 1933 – Elizabeth Azcona Cranwell born, Argentine poet, author, translator, literary critic for La Nación newspaper; noted for De los opuestos (Of the Opposites).
- March 10, 1944 – Gail North-Saunders born, Bahamian historian, archivist, and author; established the Bahamian National Archives and was its first director (1971-2004); Islanders in the Stream: A History of the Bahamian People.
- March 10, 1945 – Katherine Houghton born, American actress and playwright; though best known for her role in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Houghton has written eleven plays which have been produced, and the book for the musical Bookends.
- March 10, 1947 – Kim Campbell born, Canadian Progressive Conservative politician; was appointed by the Governor-General as the first woman and first British Columbian to be Prime Minister of Canada (1993), but the Progressive Conservatives were swept from power by a Liberal landslide that October. Her autobiography, Time and Chance, was a bestseller in Canada. In 1996, she became the Canadian consul general to Los Angeles, until 2000, and Chair of the Council of Women World Leaders (1999-2003). Campbell was also President of the International Women’s Forum (2003-2005).
- March 10, 1949 – Barbara Corcoran born, American businesswoman, investor, syndicated columnist, and author; co-founder of The Corcoran-Simoné, a real estate business (1973-1980), then formed her own firm, The Corcoran Group, and began publishing The Corcoran Report, covering real estate trends in New York City. In 2001, she sold her business to NRT Inc. for $66 million. Columnist for More Magazine, The Daily Review and Redbook; author of Shark Tales: How I Turned $1,000 into a Billion Dollar Business.
- March 10, 1961 – Laurel Salton Clark born, American physician, U.S. Navy Captain, NASA astronaut; died in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, and was posthumously awarded the Space Medal of Honor.
- March 10, 1983 – Janet Mock born, American author, television producer and host of POPular!, and transgender rights activist; her debut book, Redefining Realness, was a New York Times bestseller.
- March 10, 1984 – Olivia Wilde born, American actress, producer, director and screenwriter; known for playing Remy Hadley in the TV drama House (2007-2012). She made her feature film directing debut in 2019 with the comedy Booksmart, and has been a producer on several documentary short films. She campaigned for Barack Obama in 2008, and served on the advisory council of 18 in ’08, a youth voter registration drive, and supports the Fair Foods campaign. She is also on the Board of Directors of Artists for Peace and Justice.
- March 10, 1990 – By Senate Joint Resolution 257, Harriet Tubman Day is proclaimed on the anniversary of her death, March 10, 1913.
- March 10, 1993 – Dr. David Gunn is shot to death by an anti-abortion terrorist during an anti-abortion protest outside the Pensacola Women’s Medical Services clinic. Don Treshman, national director of ‘Rescue America,’ the group staging the protest, said after the murder, “While Gunn’s death is unfortunate, it’s also true that quite a number of babies’ lives will be saved.” Death threats, vandalism, and arson at abortion clinics increased dramatically during the 1990s; but while new laws were passed to protect abortion clinics and pro-choice advocates successfully sued anti-abortion groups under existing racketeering laws, the number of doctors providing abortion services plummeted. Dr. Gunn was a husband and the father of two children.
- March 10, 2014 – The U.S. Senate unanimously approved a bill that would change the way the military handles sexual assault cases. The legislation would remove the "good soldier defense" that has cast doubt on past criminal allegations, but, unlike a rival bill that failed in the previous week, it would still leave decisions on rape prosecutions to military commanders. Congress and the Pentagon pledged to address the persistent problem of rape in the military. In related news, a military judge halted the court-martial of Army Brigadier General Jeffrey Sinclair to look into possible Pentagon interference in the rape trial. Colonel James Pohl, the presiding judge, dismissed the jury to consider whether Army officials who rejected Sinclair's plea offer had been unduly influenced, after emails surfaced in which a senior military lawyer, writing to Fort Bragg judicial officials, questioned the accuser's credibility. The Department of Defense estimated that 18,900 U.S. service members were sexually assaulted in fiscal year 2014. Victims were frequently demeaned, demoted, disciplined, or even discharged for misconduct, almost never saw a remedy for these actions, and virtually no one was held accountable. 62% of respondents to a military survey who had experienced unwanted sexual contact and reported it to a superior said they faced retaliation as a result of reporting. Just 175 of 3,261 sexual cases (about 5%) in the Defense Department’s jurisdiction were investigated with a reportable outcome that led to a sex offense conviction in 2014. It’s estimated that only 1 in 4 victims even report sexual assaults to military authorities because of fear of retaliation and concern for their careers. In 2020, a new bill was introduced to address the problems, the “I am Vanessa Guillén” Act, named for Army Specialist Vanessa Guillén, who had told her family she was being sexually harassed before she disappeared. Parts of her dismembered body were found two months after she was reported missing. The Guillén bill never came to a vote.
- March 10, 2020 – Brazil is the fifth most violent country in the world for women. And according to figures from 2015, Mato Grosso do Sul – with a population of 2.62 million people – had a rate of 5.9 murders of women per 100,000 compared with Sao Paulo, which has more than 44 million inhabitants, where the rate was 2.9. In 2017, Judge Jacqueline Machado and her team began developing Mãos empenhadas contra a violência (Hands committed against violence), a set of 14 programmes to help combat violence against women in a patriarchal culture. Irrespective of their socio-economic background, most women frequent beauty salons in Brazil and often build an intimate relationship with the professionals there. One of Judge Machado’s innovative programs teaches beauticians domestic abuse law, covering financial and emotional abuse as well as physical violence. They learn why many women stay in abusive relationships and are told what services are available to help. Workers are shown a film, do improvisation exercises, and have conversations around the subject. Ivone Vera, who spends her days waxing clients, is one of the first cohort of beauticians in Campo Grande, Brazil, to receive training by the state’s justice department on how to spot signs of domestic abuse, and encourage women to report the crime. “What I hear in this room really affects me and sometimes I don’t know what I can do. There are times I lie awake at night, not able to go to sleep thinking about what I’ve heard,” she says. Almost 300 beauticians have now been trained in Campo Grande, and 50 salons are participating, reaching over 2200 clients a month. Three beauty schools have signed up, as well as traveling beauticians. Leaflets about violence against women are distributed in the salons. Six months after the initial training, questionnaires evaluated its impact, and 63 clients had revealed that they were living in an abusive situation. Although there is no data on how many clients have sought further help, or left their abuser, or pressed charges, the project has been replicated in seven cities in six different states across Brazil. In her waxing room, Vera recounts how after her training she helped her sister escape a violent relationship. Her sister’s her husband of four years started calling her names and telling her that she was fat and ugly. The aggression got gradually worse until one day when Vera’s sister raised the issue of unpaid bills, he grabbed a knife and pointed it at her, threatening to kill her. She grabbed hold of it, and cut her hand before she fled to her room and locked herself in. “He left soon after and she [my sister] called me to help her. We went to report the crime and the police came to arrest him. Now she has a restraining order against him.” Vera uses this story to convince her clients that they can do the same. “I listen to women, I tell them they need to be strong and ask for help. I tell them they’re a victim and where to report the crime.”
- March 10, 2021 – Melanie Wolfson, a British-Israeli woman who was asked in 2019 to change seats on two different flights between Tel Aviv and London after ultra-Orthodox Jewish men objected to sitting next to her, has been compensated by the airline, EasyJet. The airline issued a statement: “EasyJet does not believe that female passengers should be asked to move seats simply based on their gender. The airline has a policy to politely inform any customer who raises this request that this will not be accommodated. Unfortunately, according to Melanie Wolfson this policy was not followed in her case … We take this very seriously and in addition to compensating Ms Wolfson for her experience, EasyJet intends to implement additional crew training and renew our crew guidelines in order to prevent these incidents from happening in the future.”
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- March 11, 1279 – Mary of Woodstock born, daughter of Edward I of England and Eleanor of Castile. She became a nun at Amesbury Priory, at the request of her grandmother, dedicated at age seven, and formally veiled at age 12. Her parents granted her ₤100 per year, she received double the normal clothing allowance and special entitlements to wine from the Priory’s stores, and private quarters. In 1292, she was given the right to forty oaks from royal forests and twenty tuns of wine (a tun is a large barrel – sizes varied, but probably about 252 gallons per tun) per year from Southampton, and later, the management of Grove Priory in Bedfordshire. In spite of the papal decretal (decree in ecclesiastical law) by Pope Boniface VIII, requiring the claustration (strict enclosure away from the secular world) of nuns, Mary had “a retinue of up to 24 horses” who traveled with her, and she regularly attended court, even running up considerable dice gambling debts there, which her father paid. The English Dominican friar, Nicholas Trevet, dedicated his Chronicles to her, which became an important source for several popular works of the period.
- March 11, 1708 – Queen Anne withholds Royal Assent from the Scottish Militia Bill, fearing an armed Scottish military would not be loyal to the British crown; this is the last bill to be refused Royal Assent, now considered a formality.
- March 11, 1815 – Anna Bochkoltz born, German coloratura soprano, teacher, and composer; noted for her vocal range, and performances in operas by Mozart, Beethoven, and Bellini. She became in 1846 a “Membre Solo de la Sociètè du Conservatoire de Paris.” She performed mostly in Germany, Austria, and Paris, and composed several songs with piano accompaniment.
- March 11, 1818 — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's novel, Frankenstein; or The modern Prometheus, is published.
- March 11, 1843 – Pearl Rivers born as Eliza Jane Poitevent Holbrook Nicholson, southern American author, journalist, and poet.
- March 11, 1854 – Jane Meade Welch born, American journalist, music critic, and lecturer-author on American history; first woman in Buffalo NY to be a professional journalist; the first American woman to lecture at Cambridge University.
- March 11, 1872 – K. C. Groom born as Kathleen Clarice Cornwell, British novelist and short-story writer who also used other variations on her name as pen names, including Mrs. Sydney Groom and Clarice Klein; noted for The Mystery of Mr Bernard Brown, The Folly of Fear, Phantom Fortune, and The Recoil.
- March 11, 1893 – Wanda Gág born, American artist, illustrator, and author; noted for writing and illustrating the children’s book Millions of Cats, which won the 1928 Newbery award, which is the oldest American picture book still in print; her 1927 article, These Modern Women: A Hotbed of Feminists, published in The Nation; and illustrated covers for the leftist magazines The New Masses and The Liberator.
- March 11, 1896 – Lady Dorothy Mills born, British novelist, memoirist, and traveler; believed to be the ‘first white woman’ to visit Timbuktu, and traveled extensively in West Africa, Arabia, and Venezuela. She published 9 novels, 5 travel books, and a memoir.
- March 11, 1898 – Dorothy Gish born, American theatre and silent film actress; in the early days of silent film she also wrote and directed. While her sister Lillian was famous as a dramatic actress, Dorothy was better known as a comedian, and her films for Triangle and Mutual were very popular and financially successful, often covering the higher costs of D.W. Griffith’s expensive epic productions. Lillian Gish said in her autobiography, “I couldn’t make people laugh, but Dorothy could make them laugh and cry, so therefore she was the better actress than I was.” Sadly, many of Dorothy Gish’s films, especially the early ones, have been lost.
- March 11, 1900 – Hanna Bergas born, German Jewish teacher; under the Nazi regime, she was fired from her job and barred from teaching in public schools; she was hired to work in a private school, and moved with the school’s founder, Anna Essinger, and most of the school’s staff to Kent, England in 1939, where the school was re-established. Bergas and three others from the school ran a reception camp at the seaside town of Dovercourt for mostly Jewish, unaccompanied refugee children in the Kindertransports, helping the children to adjust to life in a new country.
- March 11, 1903 – Dorothy Schiff born, American newspaper owner and publisher; in 1939, she bought the tabloid New York Post, then in 1942, became the first woman newspaper publisher in New York. She supported Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression, and was credited with Nelson Rockefeller’s victory as New York Governor. She sold the Post for an estimated $30 million to the infamous Rupert Murdock in 1976.
- March 11, 1904 – Hilde Bruch born, escaped from Nazi Germany in 1933 to England and then America, pioneer and leading expert in eating disorders, especially anorexia nervosa.
- March 11, 1907 – Eleni Gatzoyiannis born, a Greek woman in an isolated mountain village near the Albanian border, was executed in August, 1948, by Communist guerrillas for defying the invaders who were going to take the village children away from their parents, and send them behind the Iron Curtain. She got her four children out, who, after seven months in a refugee camp on the Ionian coast across from Corfu, traveled on a ship to America, where their father had been kept from returning to Greece by a decade of war and revolution. Her son was 9 years old when he learned his mother was executed. He became an American reporter, using the Anglicized name Nicholas Gage, and in 1980, he quit his job with the New York Times, and began a search for the missing pieces of his mother’s story. His book, Eleni, was published in 1996.
- March 11, 1907 – Margaret “Peggy” Herbison born, Scottish Labour politician who had previously been a teacher; member of parliament for North Lanarkshire (1945-1970). Herbison was a Member of Labour National Executive Committee, and served as Labour Party Chair in 1957. She was Minister of Pensions and National Insurance Security (1964-1966) and Minister of Social Security (1966-1967).
- March 11, 1911 – Marion Stirling Pugh born, American archaeologist and author; she and her husband, Matthew Stirling, investigated the ancient Olmec civilization in Mexico, beginning in 1938, where they discovered eight colossal Olmec heads. They also worked in Panama, Ecuador, and Costa Rica. She joined the Society of Women Geographers (1948- 2000), and died in 2001.
- March 11, 1921 – Charlotte Friend born, microbiologist, in 1950s at Sloan-Kettering Institute discovered a link between defective maturation and tumor growth in mice, discoveries that were critical in establishing the role of viruses in some cancers.
- March 11, 1922 – ** Vinette J. Carroll born, director and actress, first African American woman to direct a show on Broadway in 1972, Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope, nominated for 4 Tony Awards, including her nomination for Best Director of a Musical; nominated again for a Best Director Tony for Your Arms Too Short to Box with God in 1976.
- March 11, 1925 – Margaret Oakley Dayhoff born, American physical chemist and pioneer in bioinformatics; professor at Georgetown University Medical Center, and research biochemist at the National Biomedical Research Foundation, where she developed the application of mathematics and computational methods to biochemisty, including the creation of protein and nucleic acid databases; tools to interrogate the databases, and one of the first substitution matrices, point accepted mutations (PAM); developed one-letter code for amino acids, attempting to reduce data file size describing amino acid sequences in an era of punch-card computing.
- March 11, 1926 – Patricia Randall Tindale born, English architect and civil servant; developed prototypes for school buildings for the Ministry of Education (1949-1960), then moved to the Ministry of Housing and Local Government as a founding member of its housing research and development group (1960-1970) and became head of the Department of the Environment’s Housing Development Directorate (1970-1972). She next led the Building Regulations Professional Division (1972-1981), then served as the Department of the Environment's chief architect (1982-1986) until her retirement. The Royal Society of Arts established a lecture series and the Patricia Tindale Legacy Award in her honour.
- March 11, 1927 – Freda Meissner-Blau born, Austrian politician, founder of the Austrian Green Party, and a leading figure in the Austrian Anti-Nuclear and environmental movements; elected to the Austrian National Council (parliament – 1986-1988). In 1995, co-chaired the first International Human Rights Tribunal in Vienna, condemning the Republic of Austria in all seven cases that were brought forward by the LGBT community for the persecution of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender persons in Austria between 1945 and 1995. Austria abolished its LGBT discrimination laws by 2005.
- March 11, 1933 – Sandra Milo born, Italian actress, poet, and musician; noted for her performances in Federico Fellini's 8½ and Juliet of the Spirits. She also toured Italy in 2006-2007 in a theatrical adaptation of the dark French comedy 8 Women. Milo published a book of poetry, Il Corpo e l'Anima. Le Mie Poesie, in Italian (translates as “The Body of the Soul. My Poems”) in 2019.
- March 11, 1949 – Griselda Pollock born in South Africa; after a childhood in Canada, she moved to Britain in her teens, and went on to be a highly influential cultural analyst and scholar of modern and contemporary art, and a respected feminist theorist in art history and gender studies.
- March 11, 1959 – Lorraine Hansberry’s drama A Raisin in the Sun opens at New York’s Ethel Barrymore Theatre, the first play by a black woman to run on Broadway, and the first Broadway play with an African-American director, Lloyd Richards. All the major characters are black. Only ten dramas previously on Broadway had been written by African-American playwrights, all men, and only Mulatto, by Langston Hughes, had lasted a year. A Raisin in the Sun was nominated for four Tony Awards, and named “Best Play” by the New York Drama Critics’ Circle. Hansberry was the first African-American and youngest person whose play won the Circle Award for Best Play. The original production ran from March, 1959, to June, 1960, for 530 performances. At her insistence, as a condition for selling the movie rights, Lorraine Hansberry also wrote the screenplay for the 1961 film version. Sidney Poitier and Claudia McNeil were nominated for Golden Globes for their performances, and in 2005, the film was selected for preservation by the U.S. National Film Registry of the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
- March 11, 1969 – Soraya Lamilla born as Soraya Lamilla Cuevas in New Jersey a year after her family moved to the U.S. from Columbia. The Columbian-American singer-songwriter, arranger, and record producer has maternal relatives who were Lebanese Christian émigrés to Columbia. Shortly after her birth, her family went back to Columbia, where Soraya became interested in music, and taught herself to play the guitar. When she was eight, the family returned to New Jersey, and she took up the violin, becoming a member of the New York City Youth Philharmonic. She studied literature, philosophy, and women’s studies at Rutgers University, while playing at coffee houses and rallies. Polygram Records signed her in 1994. Her first album, On nights like this/En esta noche, was released in 1996 simultaneously in English and Spanish, and she toured in the U.S., Latin America, and Europe. Several of her songs hit top of the charts in the Latin American, European, and U.S. Hispanic markets. She was diagnosed with Stage III breast cancer in 2000, went into remission in 2003, then composed, produced, and arranged her album Soraya, which won a 2004 Latin Grammy Award for Best Album by Songwriter. She became a spokesperson for breast cancer awareness, and wrote the song, "No one else/Por ser quien soy," to encourage others struggling with the disease. She died at age 37 in 2006.
- March 11, 1982 – Thora Birch born, American actress and political activist; started her career at age six in the movie Purple People Eater, but her breakthrough role was in as Jane Burnham in 1999’s American Beauty. She played the title role in the 2003 television film Homeless to Harvard: The Liz Murray Story. Birch was a delegate to the 2012 Democratic National Convention, and has campaigned for Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and state-level Democratic candidates, including North Carolina state senator Wiley Nickel.
- March 11, 1993 – Janet Reno unanimously confirmed as the first woman U.S. Attorney General – sworn in on March 12.
- March 11, 2006 – Michelle Bachelet Jeria is elected as the first woman president of Chile.
- March 11, 2019 – Italy’s highest court of appeal overturned a lower court’s reversal in 2017 of the conviction of two men on rape charges, in part because the alleged victim, a 22-year-old Peruvian woman, appeared “too masculine” to have attracted the men. The higher court ordered a retrial of the men, who originally were convicted in 2016 by a lower court. When the men appealed, they were acquitted by judges in the Ancona appeals court. The judges’ reasoning document included a passage that said the woman’s story was not credible enough because she resembled a man and was therefore unappealing. The judges – who were all women – drew their conclusions from a photograph of the woman, and the defendants’ statements that they were not attracted to her, with one man registering the victim’s number in his mobile phone under the name “Viking.” Cinzia Molinaro, the victim’s lawyer, based her appeal on that passage, “It was disgusting to read; the judges expressed various reasons for deciding to acquit them, but one was because the [defendants] said they didn’t even like her, because she was ugly. The judges also wrote that a photograph [of the woman] reflected this.” The case was sent down to be reheard by a court in Perugia. Molinaro said the defendants spiked her clients drink with drugs after they all went to a bar after an evening class. Doctors said her injuries were consistent with rape, and a high level of benzodiazepines was found in her blood. Molinaro said the woman moved back to Peru after being ostracized by the community in Ancona because she reported the men. Rebel Network, a women’s group, demonstrated in Ancona, lambasting the judges’ ruling as “medieval.” Luisa Rizzitelli, speaking for Rebel Network, said, “The worst thing is the cultural message that came from three female judges who acquitted these two men because they decided that it was improbable that they would want to rape someone who looked masculine.”
- March 11, 2020 – Harvey Weinstein, convicted in February, 2020, on charges of sexually assaulting Mimi Haleyi in 2006 and raping Jessica Mann in 2013, was sentenced by Judge James Burke to 23 years in prison. The 67-year-old disgraced movie producer's lawyers had asked the judge for a sentence of just five years, arguing that anything longer would amount to a "de facto life sentence." "I really feel remorse for this situation," Weinstein said. "... I'm not going to say these aren't great people, I had wonderful times with these people, you know," Weinstein said of his accusers. "It is just I'm totally confused and I think men are confused about all of these issues." Prosecutors had asked the judge to consider Weinstein's "total lack of remorse," and applauded the sentence, as did leaders of the #MeToo movement which the case had fueled. Weinstein is to serve his sentence in New York state, but still faced further charges in Los Angeles. Weinstein’s lawyers said they would appeal the New York verdict.
- March 11, 2021 - In the UK, the remains of Sarah Everard, a 33-year-old marketing executive who went missing on March 3, 2021, were found in Kent, fifty miles from London. She was last seen around 9 PM walking toward her home in the Brixton district of south London. A serving officer in the Metropolitan police’s diplomatic protection unit was arrested on suspicion of Everard’s murder, and also for a separate previous allegation of indecent exposure. Dame Cressida Dick, Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis, said, “The news today that it was a Metropolitan police officer who was arrested on suspicion of Sarah’s murder has sent shockwaves and anger through the public and through the Met. I speak on behalf of all my colleagues when I say that we are utterly appalled at this dreadful, dreadful news. Our job is to patrol the streets and to protect people.” Using the hashtag #SarahEverard, hundreds of women online in the UK expressed their sadness and outrage, and shared their fears about walking alone at night. Anna Yearley, joint executive director of the legal action group Reprieve, tweeted: “For all those women who text their mates to let them know they got home safe, who wear flat shoes at night so they can run if they need, who have keys in their hands ready to use, it’s not your fault. It never is. So many of us have stories of being assaulted. It’s never our fault.” On March 12, the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) told police forces across England and Wales that they could not waive Covid lockdown guidance banning gatherings for the vigils planned by thousands of women in dozens of towns and cities to honour the memory of Sarah Everard. The women’s activist group Reclaim These Streets was organising a vigil on Clapham Common in south London. Even though they canceled it, hundreds of people showed up, many bringing flowers for an impromptu memorial at the bandstand, and police arrested four people.
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- March 12, 1776 – Lady Hester Stanhope born, British antiquarian, archaeological expedition leader, adventurer, and one of the most famous travelers of her day. At age 24 in 1780, she was sent to live with her grandmother, Hester Pitt, Countess of Chatham. In August 1803, she began managing the household and arranging dinners and other social events for her unmarried uncle, William Pitt the Younger, then the British Prime Minister. Lady Hester became known as an adept political hostess and for her conversational skills. Britain awarded her an annual pension of £1200 after Pitt's death in January 1806. She began her travels in 1810, arriving at the Greek Island of Rhodes, with her physician, Charles Lewis Meryon, and her two maids. There she met Michael Bruce, who became her lover and traveling companion, and then moved on to Athens and Constantinople (now Istanbul). Her party was shipwrecked while on the way to Cairo, but reached land at Rhodes. With all their possessions gone, they borrowed Turkish clothing. Stanhope insisted on dressing in a man’s robe, turban, and slippers. A British frigate took them to Cairo. She bought a purple velvet robe, embroidered trousers, waistcoat, jacket, and sabre to wear to meet the Pasha. After Cairo, she visited Gibraltar, Malta, the Ionian Islands, the Peloponnese, Athens, Constantinople, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria over the next two years. She refused to wear a veil even in Damascus, then crossed the desert dressed as a Bedouin, with a caravan of 22 camels to carry her baggage, to see the city of Palmyra. In the multi-volume biography which Dr. Meryon later wrote about Lady Hester, he said she came into possession of a medieval Italian manuscript copied from the records of a monastery somewhere in Syria, which said a great treasure was hidden under a mosque in the ruined city of Askelon. In 1815, she persuaded Turkish authorities to let her excavate the site, but Muhammad Abu Nabbut, governor of Jaffa, was ordered to accompany her. Askelon became the first archaeological excavation in Palestine. The hoard of gold coins described in the manuscript were never found, but the work was done methodically, and documented well for the time. It also paved the way for future excavations and tourism in the area. Lady Hester settled near Sidon, a coastal town in what is now Lebanon, about halfway between Tyre and Beirut. With her commanding character, she wielded great authority in the region, but in her last years, she became increasingly reclusive, and her servants began to steal her possessions. She died in her sleep in 1839.
- March 12, 1862 – ** Jane A. Delano born, American nurse and educator; she insisted on the use of mosquito netting in Florida in 1887 to prevent the spread of yellow fever before doctors knew mosquitoes were carriers. She served as chair of the Red Cross national committee on nursing service and superintendent of the Army Nurse Corps (1909-1912), instituting the Red Cross Nursing Service as a reserve for the Army corps, so 8,000 nurses were ready for overseas duty when the U.S. entered WWI. In 1918, as director of the wartime Department of Nursing, she directed mobilization of 20,000 nurses, plus nurses’ aides and other workers, and she sent them to the U.S. Army, Navy, and the Red Cross. The influenza epidemic that swept Europe and America in 1918-1919 greatly increased demands on Delano and the Red Cross – exhausted, she fell ill and died in France on a European inspection tour in 1919. In her spare time, Delano served three terms as president of the American Nurses Association (1900–1912) and as president of the Board of Directors of the American Journal of Nursing (1908–1911), She co-authored with Isabel McIsaac, the American Red Cross Textbook on Elementary Hygiene and Home Care of the Sick (1913).
- March 12, 1864 – Alice Tegnér born, Swedish, music educator, poet, and composer, especially of children’s songs; became a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Music in 1926.
- March 12, 1877 – Annette Abbott Adams born, American lawyer and judge, first woman to serve as Assistant U.S. Attorney General (1920-1921).
- March 12, 1884 – Mississippi authorizes the first state-supported college for women, the Mississippi Industrial Institute and College.
- March 12, 1903 – Der Wald, a one-act opera written by Dame Ethel Smyth, was performed at the Metropolitan Opera, the only opera by a woman to be performed there.
- March 12, 1904 – Lyudmila Keldysh born, Russian mathematician known for her work on set theory and geometric topology; she taught at the Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences, beginning in 1934, but had to flee with her family in 1941 from the advancing German troops to Kazan, living in the gym of Kazan University until they were assigned a dorm room. In late 1942, they returned to Moscow. She was honored with the Order of the Red Banner of Labor, the Order of Maternal Glory in the 2nd degree, and in 1958 received the Prize of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. In 1964, she became a full professor at Moscow State University, but resigned in 1974 to protest of the expulsion of one of her students, and died in 1976.
- March 12, 1907 – ** Dorrit Hoffleit born, American senior research astronomer at Yale University, who worked on variable stars, astrometry, spectroscopy, meteors, and compiling and editing several editions of the Bright Star Catalog. She also mentored generations of young women and men in astronomy. In 1988, she was awarded the George Van Biesbroeck Prize by the American Astronomical Society, for a lifetime of service to astronomy. She turned 100 in March, 2007, and died a month later from complications of cancer.
- March 12, 1908 – Rita Angus born, a leading artist of New Zealand, known for portraits and landscapes; her iconic 1936 painting Cass was voted New Zealand’s most-loved painting in a 2006 poll.
- March 12, 1912 – Juliette Gordon Low assembles 18 girls together in Savannah, Georgia, for the first Girl Scout meeting.
- March 12, 1918 – Elaine de Kooning born, American Abstract Expressionist and Figurative Expressionist painter, and art critic; her portraits and other artwork have gained acclaim, after being overshadowed by her famous artist husband Willem deKooning. There was a retrospective show, “Elaine de Kooning: Portraits” at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC, from March 2015 to January 2016.
- March 12, 1923 – Clara Fraser born, American feminist and socialist political organizer; leader of the Freedom Socialist Party in 1966, and co-founder of Radical Women in 1967. Hired in 1973 by the publicly-owned utility Seattle City Light to run a hiring/training program for female electrical workers, she was fired in 1974, and filed a discrimination complaint documenting political bias and pervasive sexism. After a 7-year battle, she won a ruling affirming workers’ rights to speak out against management and to organize. She was reinstated in her former job at City Light, just as renewed furor arose over discrimination against women in non-traditional trades. Fraser joined with women and pro-affirmative action male employees to form the Employee Committee for Equal Rights at City Light (CERCL).
- March 12, 1924 – Mary Lee Woods born, English mathematician and computer programmer; during WWII, she worked for the Telecommunications Research Establishment at Malvern; worked at Mount Stromlo Observatory in Australia (1947-1951); in 1951, she joined the Ferranti International team that developed programs for University of Manchester Mark 1, Ferranti Mark 1, and Mark 1 Star computers.
- March 12, 1929 – ** Lupe Anguiano born, Mexican-American civil rights activist, advocate for women’s rights, rights of the poor, and protection of the environment; she joined Our Lady of Victory Missionary Sisters (1949-1964) but left the church after walking picket lines and protesting a proposed law that would reverse the 1963 Rumford Fair Housing Act (a law to stop racial discrimination by landlords). She worked for and in consultation with government agencies and legislative bodies, but also for Cesar Chavez as a national organizer for the United Farm Workers. She founded the National Women’s Employment and Education Inc., which helped hundreds of women gain education and work skills enabling them to get off welfare. Some of her ideas were incorporated into the landmark welfare reform legislation passed by the U.S. Congress in 1996. As a founding member of the National Women’s Political Caucus she campaigned for the E.R.A. She’s now an advocate for the California Coastal Protection Network, campaigning for environmental protection.
- March 12, 1935 – Valentyna Shevchenko born, Ukrainian politician; deputy chair of the Supreme Council Presidium of the Ukrainian SSR (1975-1985); when Oleksandr Andreyev died in office in 1984, she became acting chair of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR, and then officially chair (1985-1990). In 1989, she refused to sign the prohibition against the People’s Movement of Ukraine.
- March 12, 1936 – ** Virginia Hamilton born, African American children’s author; won a National Book Award for Children’s Books, and the 1975 Newbery Award for M.C. Higgins, the Great; and in 1992, the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Award for lifetime achievement in children’s literature.
- March 12, 1945 – Anne Summers born, Australian feminist writer, columnist, editor, and publisher. In 1969, she co-founded Women’s Liberation Movement in Adelaide. Their first national conference in 1970 was held at the University of Melbourne, and joined with other Australian women’s groups to push for equal pay. Summers and other WLM members took over two derelict houses in Sydney and turned them into Elsie Women’s Refuge, sheltering women and children escaping from domestic violence. She wrote a book, Damned Whores and God’s Police: the colonization of women in Australia, about Australian women’s history, and was hired to work as a journalist for The National Times. Her investigation of New South Wales prisons led to a royal commission, and garnered her a Walkley Award. Summers was appointed as a political adviser to Labor prime minister Bob Hawke, heading the Office of the Status of Women in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (1983- 1986), then moved to New York to become editor-in-chief of Ms. magazine. She returned to Australia as editor of the Good Weekend magazine in The Sydney Morning Herald. Summers joined the board of Greenpeace Australia in 1999 and was chair of Greenpeace International (2000-2006). Since 2017, she has been back in New York. In 2018, she published Unfettered and Alice: A Memoir.
- March 12, 1946 – Liza Minnelli born, singer-actress, international star of stage, screen, and television. Has served on the board of the non-profit Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential (IAHP/child brain development) for 20 years; and given generously of her time to AmFAR (foundation for AIDS research).
- March 12, 1948 – Sandra Brown born, American bestselling mystery and suspense novelist; has also used pen names, including Rachel Ryan and Erin St. Claire, usually for romance novels; noted for The Alibi, Seeing Red, and Tailspin.
- March 12, 1952 – ** Naomi Shihab Nye born, in St. Louis, Missouri, American poet, essayist, novelist, and anthologist; daughter of a father who came to America as a Palestinian refugee, and a born-in-America mother. “I grew up in St. Louis in a tiny house full of large music – Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson singing majestically on the stereo, my German-American mother fingering ‘The Lost Chord’ on the piano as golden light sank through trees, my Palestinian father trilling in Arabic in the shower each dawn.” During her teens, Shihab Nye lived in Ramallah in Palestine, the Old City in Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas, where she later received her BA in English and world religions from Trinity University. Shihab Nye served as the Poetry Foundation’s Young People’s Poet Laureate (2019-2021). She is the author of over 20 books, including Words Under the Words; The Turtle of Oman; A Maze Me; and Everything Comes Next.
- March 12, 1968 – Tammy Duckworth born in Thailand, Thai-American Democratic politician; Illinois Department of Veterans Affairs Director (2006-2008); U.S. Assistant Secretary of Veterans Affairs (2009-2011); first disabled woman elected to Congress, and first Asian American elected to U.S. Congress from Illinois (2013-2017); elected U.S. Senator (D-IL) in 2017; during Iraq War, served as a U.S Army helicopter pilot, and lost both her legs, the first female double amputee from that war.
- March 12, 1978 – Arina Tanemura born, Japanese shōjo manga artist, known for I.O.N., and several series, including Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne; Full Moon o Sagashite; and Idol Dreams.
- March 12, 1994 – The Church of England ordains its first 32 women priests, in alphabetical order, so technically Angela Berners-Wilson was the first to be ordained.
- March 12, 2016 – A report issued by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) confirms that the South Sudanese government conducted a “scorched earth policy” against civilians caught up in the country’s civil war, and allowed its soldiers and allied militias to rape women in lieu of wages, as well as condoning the torture and murder of suspected opponents, a death toll of at least 50,000, and deliberate displacement of an estimated 2.2 million people. The report laid bare the scale of the atrocities committed by both sides since the war broke out in December 2013 and warned that many of those may be war crimes or crimes against humanity. Most of the civilian casualties, it added, had been the result of deliberately targeted attacks rather than combat operations. While the report found that all sides had committed “serious violations and abuses,” it was unequivocal in asserting that “the government appears to be responsible for the gross and systematic human rights violations.” From April to September in 2015, the UN recorded more than 1,300 reports of rape in Unity state alone, an oil-rich area in the north of the country that has seen some of the worst violence of the conflict. Those suspected of supporting the opposition – including children and disabled people – were murdered by being burned alive, suffocated in shipping containers, shot, cut to pieces, or hanged from trees. One woman recounted being raped by five soldiers in front of her children; another was tied to a tree and forced to watch 10 soldiers rape her 15-year-old daughter. “If you looked young or good-looking, about 10 men would rape the woman; the older women were raped by about seven to nine men,” one witness explained. According to the report, the prevalence of rape suggested that its use had become “an acceptable practice by SPLA soldiers and affiliated armed militias.” Its assessment team was told that youth militias who carry out attacks with the SPLA had an agreement – “do what you can and take what you can.” The report added: “Most of the youth therefore also raided cattle, stole personal property, raped and abducted women and girls as a form of payment.” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said, “The scale and types of sexual violence – primarily by government SPLA forces and affiliated militia – are described in searing, devastating detail, as is the almost casual, yet calculated, attitude of those slaughtering civilians and destroying property and livelihoods. However, the quantity of rapes and gang-rapes described in the report must only be a snapshot of the real total.” South Sudan has been consumed by conflict since December 2013, when President Kiir accused his former vice-president, Riek Machar, of plotting a coup. The fighting quickly tore the country apart along sectarian lines, pitting supporters of Kiir, an ethnic Dinka, against those backing Machar, an ethnic Nuer.
- March 12, 2019 – Women of the Wall, an organization of Jewish women, from Israel and around the world, determined to uphold women’s right to pray aloud and read from Torah scrolls at the Kotel, the Western Wall in Jerusalem, came to celebrate 30 years of prayers. Hundreds of ultra-Orthodox teenagers were bused in to disrupt their celebration by cursing, spitting, pushing, and shoving the women, and also the men who support them, including rabbis. In a hand-held video taken by one of the women’s supporters, the police seemed to be doing little to stop the melee, and later issued a statement claiming: “Women of the Wall came to create a provocation.”
- March 12, 2020 – Pakistan’s parliament passed the nation’s first child abuse law, four years after the body of Zainab Ansari was found in a rubbish skip in the Kasur district near Lahore. The rape and murder of the 7-year-old girl caused a national outcry. Reports of a number of missing children in the district began in 2015, when authorities uncovered what they said was a pedophile ring linked to a prominent local family. The man convicted as her killer was also linked to the deaths of 7 other girls. Human Rights Minister Shireen Mazari said getting the bill passed had been “a long struggle” and added, “Finally, we have emerged today successful, getting the Zainab Alert Bill through the national assembly with a majority of votes.” Zainab Ansari’s case triggered debate in Pakistan over whether to teach children how to guard against sex abuse, a taboo subject in the Muslim-majority nation. Nearly 10 cases of child abuse a day are reported in Pakistan, with girls disproportionately affected, according to Sahil, an organization that works on child protection. The new law requires police to register a case within two hours of a child’s parents reporting them missing, and includes measures to speed up the process, including establishment of a dedicated helpline and a new agency to issue alerts for a missing child.
- March 12, 2021 – Nine women of the Yazidi community in Iraq who had been enslaved by Isis as teenagers and bore children fathered by their terrorist captors, have been cast out by their community for reuniting with their children. When Islamic State collapsed in early 2019, the Yazidi women were allowed to return to Iraq, but their children were seized from them before reaching the Iraqi border, and taken to an orphanage. When the women were offered a chance to reunite with their children after two years, they chose to leave their families and their community to meet their children at an Iraq-Syria border crossing. The Yazidi spiritual leader, Sheikh Ali Ilyas, otherwise known as Bab Sheikh, said the women were now exiled. “Neither me or the Yazidi community will accept those children,” he said. “They are free to go wherever they want, except our community. They are no longer our issue and are free to make their own decisions.” One mother said, “I have family living abroad, and even they won’t accept me … When I told my parents, they said ‘you are no longer a member of our family.’” Dr. Nemam Ghafouri, an organiser of the Yazidi mothers and founder of Joint Help for Kurdistan, said, “They have no safe place not only in Iraq but in the entire Middle East. The only thing they want is to be resettled as a group in a third country. This has been an infected wound for the Yazidi community. The only healing is reuniting those mothers who want their children and resettle them. We need to find solutions now.”
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- March 13, 1798 – ** Abigail Powers Fillmore born, American teacher and U.S. First Lady. In 1819, she taught at the New Hope Academy, a private school. One of her students was Millard Fillmore, who was only a year younger than his teacher. After a lengthy courtship, she married him in 1826. Her husband built a successful law practice and entered politics. She continued to teach until the birth of their son, the first of two children, in 1828, the same year Millard was elected to the New York State Assembly. When he became U.S. Vice President in 1849, they moved to Washington DC. Only 16 months later, President Zachary Taylor died suddenly, and they moved into the White House. Abigail was appalled by the lack of a library in the White House, so she lobbied for a special appropriation from Congress of $2,000, and created the first White House library. She also invited writers like William Thackeray, Charles Dickens, and Washington Irving to the White House. Some evidence suggests Abigail advised Millard not to sign the Fugitive Slave Act, which he did nevertheless sign, losing his nomination for a second term, as Abigail predicted would happen if he signed the Act. She caught a cold at the outdoor inaugural ceremonies for incoming president Franklin Pierce in 1853, which turned into pneumonia. She died 26 days after leaving the White House, at age 55.
- March 13, 1875 – Lizzy Ansingh born as Maria Elisabeth Ansingh, Dutch painter; considered of Holland’s leading women painters, noted for still lives, portraits, and especially for painting pictures of dolls. She was a member of Amsterdamse Joffers, a group of post-impressionist women painters, and the Amsterdam art circles Arti et Amicitiae and Sint Lucas. She also wrote two books for children, `n Vruchtenmandje (A Little Fruit Basket) and Tante Tor is jarig (Aunt Tor has Her Birthday).
- March 13, 1892 – Janet Flanner born, American journalist and author; Paris correspondent (using pseudonym “Genêt”) for The New Yorker for 50 years, except during the Nazi occupation of the city during WWII; she was made a knight of the Legion d’Honneur (1948). She published three collections of her “Letters from Paris” columns – Paris Was Yesterday: 1925-1939; Paris Journal: 1944-1955; and Paris Journal: 1956-1965, which won the 1966 National Book Award for Arts and Letters.
- March 13, 1896 – Dorothy Aldis born, children’s book author, poet, and short story writer; she also wrote columns on decorating and pets for the Sunday Tribune in Chicago. Among her many books are Time at Her Heels, Hiding, and Quick as a Wink.
- March 13, 1898 – La Meri born as Meriwether Hughes, one of the most notable ethnological dancers from 1924 into the 1970s; danced with Anna Pavlova; learned native dances all over the world, lectured, wrote articles, and founded the Ethnologic Dance Theatre.
- March 13, 1908 – Helen S. Hunter Glatz born, English composer, pianist, and teacher; first woman to receive the Royal College of Music’s Albert Medal for Composition. She married linguist Wolf Glatz in Hungary. They fled from Budapest during WWII to England. She composed chamber, brass ensemble pieces, percussion music, solo pieces, and theatre music. After her husband’s death, she taught music at Dartington Hall International Summer School (1952-1995).
- March 13, 1908 – Myrtle Bachelder born, American chemist and Women’s Army Corps officer; worked on the WWII Manhattan Project, commanding a WAC detachment of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; she was responsible for analysis of the spectroscopy of uranium isotopes at Los Alamos, to ensure the purity of sub-critical material in the world’s first atomic bombs; in 1945, she opposed a bill in Congress which would have maintained military control over nuclear research; in 1947, the newly formed Atomic Energy Commission declassified 270 secret documents, including records of Bachelder’s contributions to the success of the Manhattan Project; at the University of Chicago’s Institute for the Study of Metals, she worked as a research chemist, on a wide variety of projects, from developing methods to purify the rare elements tellurium and indium, to analyzing the chemical composition of brass cannons found on sunken ships in the Aegean Sea, and analyzing for NASA the chemistry of Moon rocks brought back from the Apollo missions from 1969 to 1972; in the 1980s, she supported nuclear arms control, but said of the work at Los Alamos during WWII, “One cannot pull that activity out of that time, set it down in the 1980s, and pass judgment.”
- March 13, 1911 – In Flint v. Stone Tracy, the U.S. Supreme Court rules 7-2 that the privilege of operating in corporate form is valuable and justifies imposition of a federal corporate income tax, which Stella P. Flint had challenged as guardian of the property of Samuel N. Stone Jr., a Minor, arguing that it is actually an excise tax on corporations, which the states can impose, but not the federal government. President Taft, in proposing the tax, said, it was to be "upon the privilege of doing business as an artificial entity and the freedom from a general partnership liability enjoyed by those who own stock." Incorporation protects stockholders from being sued for the business’s debts, or being held liable for the decisions made by the corporation’s board.
- March 13, 1911 – Dorothy M. Tangney born, Australian teacher and Labor Party politician; first woman member of the Australian Senate (1943-1968), the longest serving woman until Kathy Sullivan surpassed her record in 2001; she was an advocate for social reform, federal support for education, and establishing Australian National University as a research university.
- March 13, 1916 – Lindy Boggs born, American Democratic politician; first woman elected to the US House of Representatives from Louisiana (1973-1991); noted for her work on the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, adding the provision banning discrimination due to sex or marital status. First woman to preside over a major party convention (1976 Democratic National Convention). U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican (1997-2001).
- March 13, 1916 – Ina Ray Hutton born as Odessa Cowan, American singer and bandleader of the Melodears (1934-1939), one of the first all-female big bands. She starred on television in The Ina Ray Hutton Show (1950-1956).
- March 13, 1918 – Women are scheduled to march in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in New York for the first time because of a shortage of men due to WWI.
- March 13, 1918 – The song ‘Jerusalem’ was sung at a Suffrage Demonstration concert put on by the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies at the request of NUWSS leader, Millicent Garrett Fawcett. The composer of the music, Hubert Parry, and his wife Maude, were both enthusiastic supporters of women’s suffrage, and Parry agreed with Fawcett’s suggestion that it ought to be the Women Voters hymn. Parry said, 'I wish indeed it might become the Women Voters' hymn, as you suggest. People seem to enjoy singing it. And having the vote ought to diffuse a good deal of joy too. So they would combine happily.' Copyright was assigned to the NUWSS and when the movement was disbanded in 1928, Parry's executors reassigned it to the Women's Institutes (who had adopted it as their anthem in 1924) until the song entered the public domain in 1968.
- March 13, 1928 – Ellen Raskin born, American children’s author-illustrator; won the 1979 Newbery Medal for The Westing Game.
- March 13, 1935 – Leslie Parrish born as Marjorie Hellen, American actress, writer, producer, anti-war and environmental activist. Noted for her portrayal of Jocelyn, Raymond Shaw’s fiancée, in The Manchurian Candidate, and her frequent guest starring roles on television series, including Family Affair, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and Star Trek. She was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War, and a member of the Jeannette Rankin Brigade. She also set up STOP! (Speakers and Talent Organized for Peace), a speakers bureau for performers who opposed the war and would speak to the press and community groups. She campaigned for Eugene McCarthy in 1968, and was a delegate to the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. In 1969, she began work on a television station to cover public events, provide in-depth analysis, and showcase discussions of important developments in the world. In 1974, KVST-TV (Viewer Sponsored Television, Channel 68, Los Angeles) went on the air as part of the PBS system of stations. Performers, businesspeople, and local activists formed the board of directors and provided support for the unique station. After a difficult start, KVST received positive reviews in Los Angeles and nationwide attention. But by 1976, dissension among board members led to the demise of the station. In 1969, she and her husband built a 100% solar powered house, and she began campaigning against the Bureau of Land Management’s sale of virgin timber on BLM land in Oregon. In 1999, Parrish founded a 240-acre wildlife sanctuary on Orcas Island (in the San Juan Islands, Washington State) to save it from normal development techniques which include logging. She named it the "Spring Hill Wildlife Sanctuary," and built a dozen small, hidden homesites on a small portion of the land while preserving the forest.
- March 13, 1941 – Donella Meadows born, pioneering American environmental scientist, teacher, and writer, one of the most influential environmental thinkers of the 20th century. She earned a PhD in biophysics from Harvard in 1968, and became a research fellow at MIT, for Jay Forrester, founder of system dynamics and the principle of magnetic data storage for computers. Meadows was the lead author of The Limits to Growth, which sold over 9 million copies and was translated into 28 languages, and Thinking in Systems: a Primer. She described herself as “an opinionated columnist, perpetual fundraiser, fanatic gardener, opera-lover, baker, farmer, teacher, and global gadfly.” She wrote hundreds of articles, syndicated newspaper columns, wrote or co-authored a dozen books, and gave many speeches. She died in 2001 at age 59 of cerebral meningitis.
- March 13, 1942 – Julia Flikke of the Nurse Corps becomes the first woman colonel in the U.S. Army.
- March 13, 1944 – Susan Gerbi born, biochemist, helped devise a method to map the start site of DNA replication, researched the role of hormones in certain cancers.
- March 13, 1947 – Lesley Collier born, English principal dancer with the Royal Ballet; has taught at the Royal Ballet School since 1995.
- March 13, 1947 – Lyn St. James born as Evelyn Cornwall, American racecar driver (1996-2001); first woman to win the Indianapolis 500 Rookie of the Year award; she founded the Women in the Winner’s Circle Foundation in 1994 to provide leadership and support, encouraging more women enter the motorsports field.
- March 13, 1949 – Sian Elias born in London, New Zealand jurist; Chief Justice of New Zealand (1999-2019); Administrator of the Government (for short periods in 2001, 2006, 2010 and 2016), a duty of the Chief Justice in times when the Governor-General is unable to fulfill his or her duties; became a High Court judge in 1995; was one of the first two women to become Queen’s Counsel in New Zealand in 1988; Law Commissioner (1984-1988); she began as a barrister in 1975, and also served as a member of the Motor Spirits Licensing Appeal Authority and of the Working Party on the Environment. She is noted as a champion of legal justice for Māori people.
- March 13, 1953 – Dame Nicola V. Davies born in Wales, became a Queen’s Counsel in 1992; served as Presiding Judge of the Wales Circuit (2014-2017); she was a judge of the Queen’s Bench Division of the High Court of Justice of England and Wales.
- March 13, 1954 – Valerie A. Amos born, Baroness Amos, born in British Guiana (now Guyana), British Labour politician; United Nations Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator (2010-2015); British High Commissioner to Australia (2009-2010); Leader of the House of Lords/Lord President of the Council (2003-2007); Member of the House of Lords (1997-2010).
- March 13, 1954 – Robin Duke born, Canadian comedian, voice actress and comedy writer, noted for her work on SCTV (1980-1981) and Saturday Night Live (1981-1984); in 2004, she co-founded Women Fully Clothed, a sketch comedy troupe which toured in Canada, the U.S. and appeared at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland.
- March 13, 1956 – Dana Delany born, American actress, producer, and activist; best known for her roles in TV series, China Beach (1988-1991), Desperate Housewives (2004-2012) and Body of Proof (2011-2013), and in the films Housesitter and Tombstone. She has served on the board of the Scleroderma Research Foundation since the 1990s, and fundraised for finding a cure. She is a board member and former co-president of Creative Coalition, an arts advocacy group, is also a supporter of Planned Parenthood, and of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.
- March 13, 1964 – Kitty Genovese is raped and stabbed to death in New York City; neighbors hear her screams for help, but there is no record in police logs that anyone called the police. One neighbor, Sophia Farrar, did run down the stairs in time to hold Genovese as she died.
- March 13, 1971 – Annabeth Gish born, American film and television actress, known for her roles in the movies Mystic Pizza and Double Jeopardy, and the TV series The X-Files. She is a supporter of CARE International, Students Rebuild, and One Million Bones, and filmed a public service announcement for them in 2012.
- March 13, 1986 – Susan Butcher wins the first of three consecutive, and four total, Alaskan Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Races.
- March 13, 2016 – Organizers of the South by Southwest arts festival apologized to U.S. fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad, 30, after a volunteer told her she would have to remove her Muslim headcovering to get credentials for the festival in Austin, Texas. Muhammad, a member of the U.S. Olympic fencing team, was about to make history at the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro by becoming the first woman to represent the U.S. wearing a hijab. She lost in the women’s individual saber, but the U.S. women’s team won a bronze medal in the team saber event.
- March 13, 2020 – Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old African-American woman who worked for University of Louisville Health as an ER technician, was fatally shot in her apartment in Louisville, Kentucky. Three white plainclothes officers of the Louisville Metro Police Department, with a "no-knock" search warrant, forced entry into the apartment as part of an investigation into drug dealing operations. One of the suspects in the officer’s investigation was a former boyfriend of Taylor’s who no longer lived at her address. Taylor's current boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, was inside the apartment with her when the officers knocked on the door and then forced entry. Officers said that they announced themselves as police before forcing entry, but Walker said he did not hear any announcement, thought the officers were intruders, and fired a warning shot at them. According to officials, it hit Officer Jonathan Mattingly in the leg, and the officers fired 32 shots in return. Walker was unhurt but Taylor was hit by six bullets and died. According to police, Taylor's home was never searched. On June 23, 2020, the LMPD fired Officer Brett Hankison for blindly firing through the covered patio door and window of Taylor's apartment. On September 15, the city of Louisville agreed to pay Taylor's family $12 million, and reform police practices. None of the officers involved in the raid were charged in Taylor's death. On September 23, a state grand jury indicted Hankison on three counts of wanton endangerment for endangering Taylor's neighbors with his shots. Officer Myles Cosgrove was determined to have fired the fatal shot that killed Taylor. On October 2, 2020, recordings from the grand jury investigation into the shooting were released. The shooting of Taylor by police officers led to numerous protests, part of protests across the U.S. against police brutality and racism. When a grand jury did not indict the officers for her death, there were more demonstrations. Two of the jurors released a statement saying that the grand jury was not presented with homicide charges against the officers. Several jurors also accused Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron and the police of covering up what happened.
- March 13, 2021 – Deputy Inspector Martina de Maria Sandoval Linares, from El Salvador, works as a UN Police officer in South Sudan. “This is my first posting with the UN Police Force, known as UNPOL. I arrived in South Sudan in December 2019 to work in the UN peacekeeping mission, UNMISS. I am part of the assessment team office, collecting and analyzing information on any serious incidents that take place in the IDP (internally displaced persons) camp in Juba, the country's capital. We are here to protect them and ensure that the security situation within the camp remains stable. I think the COVID-19 pandemic is the biggest challenge we are facing. When the virus first spread in South Sudan, there was limited knowledge about our safety and that of the communities we serve. But we teamed up, and made sure we had access to masks, gloves, disinfectants, and everything else needed to keep on doing our job. I am very proud of the team I work with. It has not been easy, but because we come from so many different countries, we shared our police experiences to ensure a smooth operation ... I think the greatest impact we have as women peacekeepers is that we inspire young women and girls to think about being like us. They see us leading a life of service, of commitment to a cause that is greater than the individual. What a woman peacekeeper represents for a girl in a remote village is very powerful, it shows that they can follow their dreams, and they don’t need to limit themselves.”
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- March 14, 1489 – Caterina Cornaro, last Queen of Cyprus, goes into exile, after being forced to abdicate, and sell to the Republic of Venice the administration of Cyprus.
- March 14, 1815 – Josephine Lang born, German composer and pianist, primarily noted for songs and choral works.
- March 14, 1822 – Teresa Cristina delle Due Sicilie (of the Two Sicilies) born; became Empress consort of Brazil when she married Dom Pedro II, the last monarch of the Empire of Brazil. Through raised in a repressive, ultra conservative family, she was interested in learning, particularly about the sciences and the arts. She gave birth to four children, but only her daughter Isabel lived to adulthood. Teresa Cristina won hearts of the Brazilian people with her patience, simplicity, kindness, and generosity, while keeping her distance from political controversy. She sponsored archaeological studies, and immigration of Italians to Brazil, and promoted Brazilian culture. She became known as “Mother of the Brazilians.” When the Imperial Family were sent into exile after a coup d'état staged by army officers in 1889, she was devastated to be forced to leave her beloved adopted country. A little more than a month after the monarchy's collapse, she died at age 67, grieving and despondent, of respiratory failure leading to cardiac arrest.
- March 14, 1833 – Lucy Hobbs Taylor born, women’s rights advocate, first American woman to graduate from dental school, as a Doctor of Dental Surgery. She had been denied entrance into dental schools between 1861 and 1865, so she practiced without a diploma until the Iowa State Dental Society supported her ambition for a college degree and demanded her admission, so she was accepted by the Ohio College of Dentistry. After graduation, she practiced for a short time in Chicago, then married James M. Taylor and taught him dentistry. The couple moved to Lawrence, Kansas, in December, 1867, opened a joint office, and built a prosperous practice.
- March 14, 1836 – Isabella Mayson Beeton born, author, cookery columnist, and journalist, “Mrs. Beeton,” known for her 1861 book Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management.
- March 14, 1851 – Anna C. Maxwell born, American nurse, served as superintendent for several nursing schools, was involved in nursing in both the Spanish-American War and WWI, awarded the Medaille de l’Hygiene Publique by the French government for her work in WWI, one of the first women buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
- March 14, 1868 – Emily Murphy born, Canadian jurist, author, and activist, first woman magistrate not only in Canada, but in the British Empire; one of the ‘Famous Five’ whose Persons Case which went all the way to the Privy Council of England, and established Canadian women as ‘persons’ under the law.
- March 14, 1887 – Sylvia Beach born, American ex-pat proprietor of the famous English-language bookstore in Paris, Shakespeare & Company, a gathering place for ‘Lost Generation’ Americans, like Ernest Hemingway, Man Ray, Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald; original publisher of James Joyce’s controversial novel Ulysses.
- March 14, 1894 – Osa Leighty Johnson born, American documentary filmmaker, author, and adventurer. With her husband Martin, she studied wildlife and peoples in East and Central Africa, South Pacific Islanders and aborigines of British North Borneo. They created feature films like Among the Cannibal Isles of the South Seas, Trailing Wild African Animals, Osa’s Four Years in Paradise, and Across the World with Mr. and Mrs. Johnson. She wrote I Married Adventure, her autobiography, which was the best-selling non-fiction book of 1940. After her husband’s death, she made her own TV show, The Big Game Hunt, which debuted in 1952. It was the first television wildlife series. The Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum is in Chanute, Kansas, her hometown.
- March 14, 1902 – Margaret A. Hickey born, American attorney, journalist, and women’s rights activist; as a lawyer, she worked primarily in poverty law because of the Depression, and established the Margaret Hickey School for Secretaries in 1933; chaired the Women’s Advisory Committee of the War Manpower Commission (1942). She was president of the National Federation of Business and Professional Women (1944-1946), and represented the NFBPW at the UN Conference in San Francisco (1945). Served as chair of the Commission on the Status of Women in 1961.
- March 14, 1918 – ‘Dickey’ Chapelle born as Georgette Meyer, American photojournalist known for her work as a war correspondent from WWII through the Vietnam War.
- March 14, 1918 – ** Zoia Horn born in Ukraine, American librarian; her family emigrated to Canada when she was 8 years old, and then to New York City, where she attended the Pratt Institute Library school and first began working in a library in 1942. She joined the American Library Association and state library organizations. She was a peace activist, participating in vigils protesting the Vietnam War. In 1968, she became Head of the Reference Department at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. In January 1971, she was contacted by the FBI agents seeking information on Father Philip Berrigan, noted anti-war activist, who was serving a sentence in a nearby federal prison for burning draft files. The FBI believed he was plotting with six others to blow up heating tunnels under Washington DC, and to kidnap Henry Kissinger. Boyd Douglas, a prisoner working at the Bucknell library on a work/study program, was relaying letters between Berrigan and other anti-war activists. Horn was subpoenaed by the prosecution, but refused to testify at the trial on grounds that her forced testimony would threaten intellectual and academic freedom. She served 20 days in jail, but was released after the prosecution’s case proved unreliable. Judith Krug, of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, called Horn “the first librarian who spent time in jail for a value of our profession.” In 2002, she was honored with the Robert B. Downs Intellectual Freedom Award. She continued to speak out on issues of intellectual freedom, defending librarians who were dismissed or attacked for supplying “subversive materials,” and opposed the Patriot Act provisions for library surveillance, and for gaining warrants for records of library patrons. Horn also campaigned against fees in public libraries because they created barriers to information access.
- March 14, 1921 – Ada Louise Huxtable born, author, architecture critic and preservationist, won the inaugural Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1970.
- March 14, 1922 – China Zorrilla born, Uruguayan theatre, film and television actress, producer, director, and writer, a “Grande Dame” of South American theatre, popular on stage, screen and television in both Argentina and Uruguay. Co-founder of Teatro de la Ciudad de Montevideo, which also toured in Buenos Aires, Paris, and Madrid. They won the Spanish Critics Award for their 1961 productions of plays by Spanish authors Federico García Lorca and Lope de Vega. In the 1960s, she staged a children’s musical, Canciones para mirar, written by Argentine poet Maria Elena Walsh, in New York City. Zorilla was a correspondent for the Uruguayan newspaper El País, covering events like the Cannes Film Festival. She also directed operas by Puccini and Rossini at the Teatro Argentino de La Plata for their 1977 season. In 2008, she was invested Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government. She lived to be 90 years old.
- March 14, 1923 – Diane Arbus born, unique American photographer, noted for photographing marginalized people; the first American photographer whose work was displayed at the influential Venice Biennale.
- March 14, 1942 – Anne Sheafe Miller, age 33, of New Haven, CT, was dying of hemolytic streptococcal septicemia, then a common infection resulting from miscarriage. Four weeks of treatment, including sulfa drugs, had failed to stop the infection, and her temperature kept climbing. Dr. John Bumstead was her physician, but he was also treating another patient, John F. Fulton, MD, in a hospital room just down the hall. Dr. Fulton was a clinician and researcher known for his extensive research into the relationship between the brain and disease. During the war, Fulton had put his reputation and contacts to work to help Howard Florey, a friend from his student days at Oxford. Florey was an Australian researcher who expanded on Alexander Fleming’s 1928 discovery of penicillin by isolating its active ingredient and demonstrating its therapeutic properties. Dr. Bumstead asked Dr. Fulton to use his connections to get a sample of penicillin to try on Anne Miller. 5.5 grams of penicillin, flown in from Merck and Co., were delivered to the hospital by a state trooper. Nobody knew how much of a dose to give the patient. It had been used on a few patients in England, but had never been tried in the U.S. On March 14, Miller received her first dose via intravenous drip at 3:30 p.m., and two more doses during the night. The next morning her temperature, which had hovered between 103 and 106.5 degrees, dropped to normal for the first time in four weeks. By following day, her bacteria count had dropped, her appetite had returned, and she had eaten four meals. Miller fully recovered, and lived to the age of 90. Her dramatic recovery helped convince the U.S. pharmaceutical industry that the antibiotic was viable and worthy of mass production.
- March 14, 1948 – In the UK, new laws were proposed allowing British women married to foreigners to automatically retain their citizenship; only the status of women who choose to formally renounce their British citizenship would change. WWII saw almost 70,000 British women marry U.S. soldiers.
- March 14, 1948 – Nicole Taton Capitaine born, French astronomer, expert in astrometry, at the Paris Observatory; graduated in 1970 from Pierre and Marie Curie University, and earned a doctorate there in 1972. In 1985, she became deputy director of the department of fundamental astronomy at the Paris Observatory, and the director of the observatory in 1993. She was part of the Space Geodesy Research Group (GRGS). Retired in 2013; now an emeritus astronomer.
- March 14, 1958 – Francine Stock born, British radio producer and news presenter, who has also worked in BBC television, and novelist; she has worked for the BBC since 1983 on several programmes, including Newsnight, The Money Programme, and Front Row. She has written two novels: A Foreign Country, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel award, and Man-Made Fibre.
- March 14, 1960 – Heidi B. Hammel born, American planetary astronomer; vice president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), which operates world-class astronomical observatories like the National Solar Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope; she is the interdisciplinary scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope; 2002 recipient of the Carl Sagan Medal for communication enhancing the public’s understanding of planetary science.
- March 14, 1972 – Irom Chanu Sharmila born, Indian poet, civil rights and political activist, often called “the world’s longest hunger striker,” for her hunger strike which lasted from 2000 to 2016, to protest the civil rights violations under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act which only applies to her home state of Manipur, and gives the army power to search properties without a warrant, to arrest people, or to use deadly force if there is "reasonable suspicion" that a person is acting against the state. She was arrested several times for “attempting suicide,” and nasogastric intubation forced on her for long periods while in custody. Amnesty International declared her as a prisoner of conscience.“People just started praising my glory without listening to what I wanted from them. That prolonged sense of responsibility and commitment was left to me alone. It needed to be a collective cause, a mass cause. I was isolated and idolised, living on a pedestal, without voice, without feeling,” she says. In July 2016 she shocked the country and her supporters by abruptly announcing an end date to her fast. “Nothing had changed in people’s mindsets after 16 years,” she says. “I really wanted to change myself, the environment, the tactics, everything.” In August 2016, she ended her fast, after 5,574 days.
- March 14, 1975 – Rushanara Ali born in Bangladesh, British Labour politician, Member of Parliament for Bethnal Green and Bow since 2010; worked at the Communities Directorate of the Home Office (2002-2005), where she led a work programme to mobilise local and national agencies in the aftermath of the 2001 riots; research fellow at the Institute of Public Policy Research (1999–2002); worked on human rights issues at the Foreign Office (2000–2001); worked as parliamentary assistant to MP Oona King (1997-1999). When she went to Oxford, she was the first in her family to go to university, then worked as a research assistant for sociologist Michael Young. Rushanara Ali also helped develop Language Line, a national telephone interpreting service available in over 100 languages.
- March 14, 1977 – Britta Byström born, Swedish composer, primarily of orchestral music, but has also composed vocal music and opera.
- March 14, 1997 – Simone Biles born, American artistic gymnast who holds a combined 32 Olympic and World Championship medals, 19 of them gold. In January, 2018, Biles confirmed on Twitter that Larry Nassar, former USA Gymnastics physician, has sexually assaulted her. She also alleged that USA Gymnastics had helped cover it up. In September 2021, she told the Senate Judiciary Committee that USA Gymnastics and the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee "failed to do their jobs."
- March 14, 2019 – At least 49 people were killed in mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, Police Commissioner Mike Bush said, and dozens more seriously wounded. Police said three people were taken into custody, and one person was charged with murder. A man who claimed responsibility for the attacks posted links to a white-nationalist, anti-immigrant manifesto on social media and identified himself as a racist. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said many of those targeted may be migrants and refugees. "It is clear that this can now only be described as a terrorist attack," Ardern said, adding that this "will be one of New Zealand's darkest days." New Zealand's national security alert status was raised to high.
- March 14, 2020 – Countries around the world continued to enact strict measures such as border closures and flight cancellations to combat the spread of the novel COVID-19 coronavirus. In New Zealand, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced government implementation of a policy under which all travelers, even New Zealanders, must self-isolate upon their arrival in the country for 14 days starting March 15 at midnight. Ardern said New Zealand "will have the widest ranging and toughest border restrictions of any country in the world" and "I make no apologies." All cruise ships were banned from coming to New Zealand until June 30 as well. There had been only six confirmed cases and no deaths attributed to COVID-19 in New Zealand as of that date. The total on March 15, 2021, were 2076 confirmed covid cases and 356 probable cases, with 26 deaths.
- March 14, 2021 – Women protested across Australia against sexual violence and gender inequality, with tens of thousands hitting the streets as outrage grew over rape allegations that have convulsed the conservative government. #March4Justice rallies were held in more than 40 Australian cities and towns, with a major demonstration in Canberra following allegations of sexual assault in the nation's parliament. Former government staffer Brittany Higgins alleged publicly last month that she had been raped by a colleague in a minister's office in 2019. The government has ordered an independent inquiry into parliament's workplace culture and established new support services for staff. But critics say systemic change is needed – not just in politics but across Australian society. Brittany Higgins told the crowd in Canberra her story was "a painful reminder to women that it can happen in Parliament House, and can truly happen anywhere. We fundamentally recognise the system is broken, the glass ceiling is still in place. We are here because it is unfathomable that we are still having to fight this same stale, tired fight." #March4Justice is demanding a raft of measures including independent investigations into all cases of gendered violence, a boost in public funding for prevention and the implementation of recommendations from a 2020 national inquiry into sexual harassment at work. A group of independent and minor party women politicians announced they are working to amend a loophole in legislation, which shields members of parliament and the judiciary from liability for workplace sexual harassment.
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- March 15, 1825 – Harriet E. Wilson born, one of the first African-American women novelists; her novel, Our Nig, or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, was published anonymously in 1859 in Boston, but was not widely known until it was discovered in 1982 by the scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
- March 15, 1838 – Alice Cunningham Fletcher born, American ethnologist, studied and documented Native American culture, beginning with the Omaha people in 1880. She was one of the first in her field to live among the people she studied. She also worked with the Nez Perce and the Pawnee. Fletcher collaborated on transcribing hundreds of songs of the Plains Indians. She was well-known on the public lecture circuit. Her published works include The Supernatural Among the Omaha Tribe of Indians; Historical Sketch of the Omaha Tribe of Indians in Nebraska; and Indian Games and Dances with Native Songs.
- March 15, 1852 – Augusta, Lady Gregory born, Irish dramatist, folklorist, and theatre manager; co-founder with William Butler Yeats and Edward Martyn of the Irish Literary Theatre and the world-famed Abbey Theatre. She wrote numerous short works for the companies at both theatres, and produced a number of books retelling stories from Irish mythology. Lady Gregory was a prominent cultural nationalist, and a leader of Ireland’s Literary Revival and the renewed interest in Ireland’s Gaelic heritage in the late 19th and early 20 centuries. Her home at Coole Park was a major meeting place for leaders of the Revival.
- March 15, 1868 – Grace Chisholm Young born, British mathematician; educated at Girton College, University of Cambridge, where she passed her final examinations with the equivalent of a First Class degree, but women at the time were only given certificates, and not included on the Honours Lists. On a challenge from a classmate, she took the exam for the Final Honours School in mathematics at the University of Oxford in 1892, and outperformed all the Oxford students, making her the first person to achieve the level of a First at both Oxford and Cambridge in any subject. Young continued her studies at Göttingen University in Germany, working on an equation to determine the orbit of a comet, and in 1895 she became the first woman to receive a doctorate in any field from a German University. Her earliest work on the theory of functions of a real variable was published under the name of her husband, fellow mathematician William Henry Young. After she began publishing under her own name, Girton College awarded her the Gamble Prize for Mathematics for her work on calculus (1914-1916). She and her husband did continue to collaborate and publish their work jointly until his death in 1942, although she did the majority of the writing. They were the first to publish a textbook on set theory, The Theory of Sets of Points (1906).
- March 15, 1868 – Lida Gustava Heymann born, German women’s rights activist, with her partner Anita Augspurg co-founds the movement to abolish prostitution in Germany; the Society for Women’s Suffrage; the newspaper Women in the State; a co-educational high school; and professional associations for women.
- March 15, 1880 – Hattie Carnegie born in Austria, American fashion designer/entrepreneur for both couture and ready-to-wear lines, designs Women’s Army Corps uniform; Congressional Medal of Freedom for the WAC uniform design and other charitable and patriotic contributions.
- March 15, 1887 – Marjorie Merriweather Post born, American owner of General Foods, philanthropist and noted art collector. She funded a U.S. Army Hospital in France during WWI, and was presented in 1971 with the Silver Fawn Award by the Boy Scouts of America for her support. Lake Merriweather at the Goshen Scout Reservation in Virginia is also named for her.
- March 15, 1896 – Marion Cuthbert born, writer and educator; she was the first black woman Dean of Women at Brooklyn College (1944-1961), and a co-founder of the National Association of College Women, which fought discrimination in higher education (1932). She wrote a pioneering dissertation, “Education and Marginality: A Study of the Negro Woman College Graduate” (1942), which focused on the experiences of black women students at the intersection of race, gender, and culture. Cuthbert was secretary of the National Board of YWCA. She was a member of the NAACP, and also served on the boards of numerous peace and human rights groups.
- March 15, 1900 – In Paris, Sarah Bernhardt stars in the premiere of Edmond Rostand’s L’Aiglon.
- March 15, 1905 – Margaret Webster born, theater actress, director and producer with citizenship and successful careers in both the UK and the US, known for her Shakespearean productions, including a groundbreaking Othello (1943) with Paul Robeson and Jose Ferrer.
- March 15, 1907 – In Finland, women win their first seats in the Finnish Parliament; they take their oaths of office on May 23.
- March 15, 1909 – Jaroslava Muchová born, Czech painter and art restorer, noted for her work on Slovanská epopej (The Slav Epic), a major project initiated by her father, painter Alphonse Mucha, and especially for her restoration of works from the Slav Epic damaged by frost and water when they were hidden away during WWII to keep them falling into the hands of the Nazis.
- March 15, 1921 – Eileen “Didi’ Nearne born; her family moved to France when she was two years old. After the 1940 German invasion, she and her sister made their way with difficulty to London. Both were recruited by the UK’s Special Operations Executive (SOE), and sent into occupied France, Didi in March 1944 as a radio operator. She was assigned maintain the wireless link to London for the Wizard network in Paris, which found local sources of finance for the Resistance. She was arrested in July, 1944, when her transmitter was detected. She was tortured, but didn’t break, and convinced her captors that she thought she was sending messages for a businessman, and didn’t know he was a British spy. In August, she was sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp, then moved to a forced-labor camp in Silesia. In April, 1945, she and two French girls from a work gang escaped, hiding in the forest, then reached the outskirts of Leipzig, where they were arrested by the S.S., but released after fooling their captors, then were hidden in Leipzig until U.S. troops arrived. The French government awarded her the Croix de Guerre.
- March 15, 1921 – Madelyn Pugh born, American television writer and producer whose career began in radio; best known as a writer and producer on I Love Lucy, but also worked on other TV series, and co-wrote the scripts for Lucile Ball’s films Forever, Darling and Yours, Mine and Ours with her frequent writing partner, Bob Carroll Jr.
- March 15, 1927 – The first Women’s Boat Race, which would become an annual event in 1964, took place between Cambridge University Women's Boat Club and Oxford University Women's Boat Club, on the “Isis” (the River Thames) at Oxford. The race was won by Oxford in a time of 3 minutes 36 seconds, beating Cambridge by 15 seconds.
- March 15, 1930 – Wilma L. Vaught born, Brigadier General in U.S. Air Force, first woman to deploy with an Air Force bomber unit, inductee into National Women’s Hall of Fame and the Army Women’s Foundation Hall of Fame.
- March 15, 1933 – Ruth Bader Ginsburg born, American lawyer, professor, and second woman appointed as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1993). She was a courtroom advocate for fair treatment of women, co-founder of Women’s Rights Law Reporter, the first U.S. law journal to focus exclusively on women’s rights (1970); taught at Columbia Law School (1972-1980), becoming Columbia’s first female tenured professor; worked on the ACLU Women’s Rights Project cases involving discriminatory labor laws. In addition to her opinions on the Supreme Court against gender discrimination, and in favor of abortion rights, she was also known for dissenting on ending the section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which required federal preclearance before changing voting practices: "Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet." She died of complications from pancreatic cancer in September 2020 at age 87.
- March 15, 1939 – Julie Tullis born, British mountaineer and filmmaker; first British woman to reach the summit of K2 in 1986, but she died from injuries after a fall during the descent. Her autobiography, Clouds from Both Sides, was published posthumously.
- March 15, 1941 – Carolyn Hansson born in England, Canadian materials engineer and research scientist; first woman accepted as a student at the Royal School of Mines at Imperial College, London, and first woman to graduate from RSM with a PhD in metallurgy. Hansson is known for pioneering a monitoring system for evaluating the integrity of concrete structures, measuring the amount of corrosion of steel inside concrete; she also studies rust-resistant reinforcing materials. In 1990, she became a professor and head of the Materials and Metallurgical Engineering Department at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada, then joined the University of Waterloo as Vice President of University Research (1996-2001). She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and was appointed as a Member of the Order of Canada in 2015.
- March 15, 1943 – Lynda La Plante born, English author and screenwriter; best known for the television crime series, Prime Suspect.
- March 15, 1948 – Kate Bornstein born, American author, playwright, performer, and gender theorist; in 1986, she identified as gender non-conforming and underwent gender affirmation surgery. Author of Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us; My Gender Workbook: How to Become a Real Man, a Real Woman, the Real You, or Something Else Entirely; and A Queer and Pleasant Danger: A Memoir.
- March 15, 1958 – Ann Davies born, British television and radio presenter and newsreader, currently for BBC East Midlands Today, writes articles for Woman’s Weekly, and is the announcement voice for Indigo bus service in Derbyshire.
- March 15, 1959 – Lisa Holton born, American journalist, editor, and non-fiction author; in 1998, she launched the Lisa Company, and has been president since 2012 of Classroom, Inc, a nonprofit organization working to close the achievement gap for low-income adolescents by using technology; former Chicago Sun-Times Business Editor.
- March 15, 1965 – Sunetra Gupta born, Indian Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology in the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford, with an interest in infectious disease agents that are responsible for malaria, HIV, influenza and bacterial meningitis. Awarded the 2009 Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Award for her research on Surviving pandemics: a pathogen’s perspective. She is also the author of works of fiction in Bengali and in English, including the English-language novel, Memories of Rain, awarded the 1996 Sahitya Akademi Award by the Government of India.
- March 15, 1967 – Naoko Takeuchi born, Japanese manga artist; known for her series, Sailor Moon.
- March 15, 1973 – Robin Hunicke born, American video game designer and producer; noted for MySims, Bloom Blox, and Journey.
- March 15, 1976 – Katherine Brooks born, American film writer and director; noted for her feature films, Loving Annabelle, and Waking Madison. She is an LGBTQ activist, and a spokesperson for PETA.
- March 15, 2014 – In the UK, a newly published Home Office code of conduct suggests there will be a tightening of guidelines on undercover surveillance, but it does not explicitly rule out officers engaging in sexual relationships with those being spied on, or those who associate with the target. The new code only says that intrusion into someone's "private or family life," even when they are not the direct targets of the surveillance, should be “justified by the information that might be discovered.” Eight women, who say they were duped into forming long-term sexual relationships with undercover policemen, have attacked the government's failure to ban such behavior. The women are seeking redress for their alleged suffering through the high court. One of them, known in court records as “Lisa,” had a six-year relationship with an undercover officer posing as an activist while he was actually attached to the National Public Order Intelligence Unit spying on environmental activists. She told reporters, "We've heard so many different senior police officers say that it should never happen again, so when they had a chance to put it in the guidelines I expected that they would. In a way, I am not surprised because I've never got the impression that they really understand. The new code talks of levels of intrusiveness and the need for different levels of authorisation, but they have previously relied on the test that intrusion has to be necessary. Well that has allowed them to get away with all this stuff that is now coming out. So that isn't enough of a safeguard. It hasn't been in the past and it won't be in the future. Unless it is made clear that officers who engage in intrusive activity will face a charge of gross misconduct or be dismissed, or there will be some consequences, then this behaviour will not stop." Lisa said that the group of eight women would soon be formally responding to the Home Office's proposals. She said: "We have been trying to think of an extreme circumstance where this should be allowable and we can't think of a single one. Senior cops keep saying it is unacceptable and keep failing to do anything about it in any way." Five undercover officers who infiltrated environmental campaign groups between the mid-1980s and 2010 are accused of engaging in sexual relationships with the women lasting from seven months to nine years. Scotland Yard was forced earlier in March to drop an attempt to block legal action by five of the women. They conceded that the attempt was neither "appropriate or proportionate" in the wake of Home Secretary Theresa May’s order of a public inquiry into the undercover infiltration of political groups.
- March 15, 2020 – Netflix stalled their plans to release an Australian documentary about Danish murderer Peter Madsen, after accusations it contains footage of two people without their consent, and would re-traumatise and “endanger their health” if it airs. Madsen, a well-known Danish inventor, was sentenced to life in jail for the murder and sexual assault of journalist Kim Wall, after he invited her onto his homemade submarine under the pretence of an interview in August 2017. Australian director Emma Sullivan had been filming Madsen and his volunteer crew for months for an unrelated documentary, about the inventor’s attempt to build a homemade rocket, when the murder took place. The resulting film, Into the Deep, contains extensive interviews with Madsen up until the day of the murder, as well as the people who worked with him. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2020, and had been scheduled for release by the international streaming giant later this year. However, two of the people filmed and the film’s cinematographer have withdrawn support for the film saying it would harm and be “a complete poison” to its subjects. One woman in the documentary, Anja Olsen said she never signed a release form to allow her footage to be used, and told the director and producers repeatedly she was suffering severe mental health effects due to the film’s impending wide release. In portions of the film, as aired at Sundance, Madsen is shown threatening Olsen physically and writing that he would kill other volunteers in his workshop. “I appear against my will as a participant in the documentary,” Olsen said on social media. “I repeatedly and unequivocally told the director Emma Sullivan that I did not want to participate, that it would endanger my health due to trauma I suffer following the murder case.”
- March 15, 2021 – Academy Awards: nominations for 2021 included two women nominees for Best Director, Chloé Zhao for Nomadland and Emerald Fennel for Promising Young Woman. Both films were also nominated for Best Picture, and Best Actress in a Leading Role, Frances McDormand for Nomadland, and Carey Mulligan for Promising Young Woman. Nomadland went on to win for Best Director, Best Picture, and Best Actress. Zhao became the first Asian woman and the second woman to win Best Director; McDormand became the first woman and fourth person to win Academy Awards for both acting and producing, and the first person ever to win Academy Awards as producer and performer for the same film.
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- March 16, 1750 – Caroline Herschel born, German-English astronomer, who was the sister of William Herschel, as well as his assistant, and made calculations associated with his studies. She was the first woman to discover a comet, and went on to discover several more; the first woman known to be paid for her contribution to science; the first woman to be awarded a Royal Astronomical Society Gold Medal (1828), and one of the two first women to be named Royal Astronomical Society Honorary Members (1835, with Mary Somerville).
- March 16, 1799 – Anna Children Atkins born, English botanist and pioneering photographer; in Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, she records all the specimens of algae found in the British Isles, and also created Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Flowering Plants and Ferns – they are the first sustained demonstrations that photography could be scientifically useful. She is also credited as the first person to publish a book with photographs.
- March 16, 1808 – Hannah T. King born in England, Mormon pioneer and author; last woman sealed to Brigham Young, who had 55 wives; author of Songs of the Heart.
- March 16, 1822 – Rosa Bonheur born, French painter and sculptor, the most famous and financially successful woman artist of her day. Women were only reluctantly educated as artists, so her success helped to open doors for the women artists who followed her.
- March 16, 1846 – Rebecca Cole born, second black American woman to become a physician; in 1873, she and fellow physician Charlotte Abbey opened the Women’s Directory Center in Philadelphia to provide legal and medical services to poor women and children; she was appointed superintendent of the Association for the Relief of Destitute Colored Women and Children in Washington DC (1899), and continued to practice medicine for 50 years.
- March 16, 1881 – Fannie Charles Dillon born, American pianist and composer; known for incorporating bird calls into her scores. In 1924, she founded the Woodland Theatre, and was its general manager (1926-1929), at Big Bear Lake in California. She also taught classes in the 1920s at Los Angeles High School. John Cage was one of her students.
- March 16, 1882 – A campaign to persuade the U.S. to become a signatory of the Geneva Convention, launched by Clara Barton and her allies in 1877, finally met success when President Chester A. Arthur signed the Geneva Convention on March 1, 1882, and the U.S. Senate ratified the convention on this day. The American Red Cross became officially allied with the International Committee of the Red Cross. A new campaign was launched, to obtain a Congressional Charter, which would give the American Red Cross legal protection through federal incorporation, and protection for the Red Cross insignia. This campaign was not won until 1900.
- March 16, 1883 – Ethel Anderson born in England, Australian author, poet, art critic and painter; founded the Turramurra Wall Painters Union in New South Wales. She is known for designing the murals in the Children’s Chapel of St. James’ church in Sydney, which she worked on with the Turramurra Wall Painters, and for her poem “The Song of Hagar.”
- March 16, 1883 – Susan Hayhurst at age 63, graduates from the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, the only woman in her class of 150, and the first woman to earn a pharmacy degree in the U.S. She was the head of the pharmaceutical department at the Woman's Hospital of Philadelphia since 1876, and served as the department’s head for a total of 33 years. Previously, she graduated in 1857 from the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania with a degree in medicine. Hayhurst was a mentor to at least 65 women pharmacists, and an active member of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the Woman's Suffrage Society of Philadelphia. She died in 1909 at age 88. The Philadelphia College of Pharmacy held a memorial service in her honor, and commissioned her portrait to be hung in its museum.
- March 16, 1900 – Eveline Burns born in Britain, American economist, technical expert; helped design social security, served on National Resources Planning Board (1939-43), wrote The American Social Security System (1949), the standard text in this field; Columbia Professor of Social Work.
- March 16, 1916 – Mercedes McCambridge born, American actress who struggled with alcoholism, and went public with her addiction in order to help others and bring public recognition to alcoholism as a disease; from 1975 to 1982, she devoted her time to the Livengrin Foundation, a treatment and rehabilitation center, first as a volunteer board member, then as President and CEO, responsible for day-to-day operations. She was a staunch liberal Democrat, and campaigned for Adlai Stevenson. Her memoir The Quality of Mercy: An Autobiography is quite frank about her problems. She was a member of Orson Welles’ Mercury Summer Theatre of the Air company, and won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for All the King’s Men, and was nominated again in the same category for Giant.
- March 16, 1917 – Laure Pillay born, the first woman barrister and first woman magistrate in Mauritius. She originally went to London in 1938 to study medicine, but after WWII broke out, she went to work in the British Foreign Office until 1945. She went home after the war, but returned to London to study law, and was admitted to both Lincoln’s Inn, and the bar in Mauritius in 1955. Pillay, a feminist, became an advocate for women who were victims of domestic violence, and handled many divorce cases. She advocated for women’s rights as a representative of Mauritius at seminars in Addis Ababa and Berlin on women's roles in Africa. In 1967, she was appointed as a magistrate, and later as a Senior Magistrate, before returning to private practice. She was a founding member of the Mauritius Family Planning Association, and an assessor for the Industrial Relations Commissions. In March 2017, she celebrated her 100th birthday, surrounded by her three children, five grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. At the time, she was the oldest member of the legal profession in Mauritius. She died four months later.
- March 16, 1923 – Anne-Marie Walters born to an English father and a French mother; she was recruited by the UK’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) during WWII, and was a courier for the Wheelwright network in SW France, from January to August in 1944. At age 20, she was one of the youngest women SOE agents, and posed as a student from Paris recovering from pneumonia at the farm of a “family friend.” She organized an escape across the Pyrenees to Spain for 15 French Resistance fighters who escaped from a French prison, and delivered some of the suitcases full of explosives used to blow up a powder factory. After the Normandy invasion, the Nazis became more aggressive in attempts to suppress the maquis, and during an attack on June 21, 1944, Walters distributed hand grenades, buried incriminating documents, and saved SOE money before escaping with the survivors. She left France in August, 1944, by way of Spain to Algiers, and returned to London. She was awarded the Croix de Guerre and Médaille de la Reconnaissance française, a medal for civilians.
- March 16, 1925 – Mary Hinkson born, African American dancer and choreographer; member of the Martha Graham Dance Company (1953-1973); also appeared at the New York City Opera, and worked with Alvin Ailey; taught at the Juilliard School of Music, Dance Theatre of Harlem, and the Ailey School.
- March 16, 1943 – Ursula Goodenough born, educator and author, now Professor of Biology Emerita at Washington University in St. Louis, where she continues to engage in research on eukaryotic algae; author of the best-selling book Sacred Depths of Nature, and presenter of her programs Religious Naturalism, and Epic of Evolution in venues around the world, including a Mind and Life dialogue with the Dalai Lama in 2002. She earned her PhD in Biology at Harvard University, and was an assistant and associate professor of biology at Harvard (1971-1978) before she moved to Washington University. She served as president of the American Society for Cell Biology (1984-1985). She was elected to the Cellular and Developmental Biology section of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009; elected a Fellow of the American Society for Microbiology in 2013.
- March 16, 1946 – Mary Kaldor born, English economist and academic; Professor of Governance at the London School of economics; key figure in development of cosmopolitan democracy, which advocates policy decisions being made by those affected, avoiding a single hierarchical form of authority, in a kind of global governance without world government; founding member of European Nuclear Disarmament and the European Council on Foreign Relations; author of Global Civil Society: an answer to war.
- March 16, 1948 – Catherine Quéré born, French Socialist politician and wine-grower; Member of Parliament for Charente-Maritime’s 3rd constituency since 2007; Vice-president and Regional Councillor of the Poitou-Charentes Regional Council (2004-2007).
- March 16, 1954 – Nancy Lamoureaux Wilson born, American musician, singer-songwriter, and film composer; best known as a member of the rock band Heart, and for her film scores for Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous.
- March 16, 1956 – Yoriko Shono born as Yoriko Ishikawa, Japanese writer; noted for her short story collection, Nani mo Shitenai (Not Do Anything), winner of the Noma Literary Prize for New Writers, and her story “Ni Hyaku Kaiki” (roughly translated as “repeated regression”) which won the Mishima Yukio Prize.
- March 16, 1956 – Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf born, Swiss politician; President of Switzerland (2012); Vice President of Switzerland (2011); Minister of Finance (2010-2015); Minister of Justice and Police (2008-2010); Member of the Swiss Federal Council (2008-2015).
- March 16, 1958 – Kate Worley born, American comic book writer; noted for her work on Omaha the Cat Dancer; she was also a writer and performer for the science fiction comedy show Shockwave Radio Theater. She died of cancer in 2004.
- March 16, 1960 – Jenny Éclair born, English comedian, novelist, and actress; helped develop and worked on Grumpy Old Women (2004-2007) and was a panelist on Loose Women (2011-2012); author of The Book of Bad Behaviour (non-fiction), the novels Having a Lovely Time, and Life, Death and Vanilla Slices.
- March 16, 1967 – Lauren Graham born, American actress and author; best known for her role on the television series Gilmore Girls (2000-2007); she also published a novel, Someday, Someday, Maybe in 2013, which made the NY Times bestseller list; a memoir in 2016, Talking as Fast as I Can: from Gilmore Girls to Gilmore Girls (and Everything in Between); and In Conclusion, Don’t Worry About It, in 2018. In 2017, she wrote a screenplay based on the novel The Royal We, by Heather Cocks.
- March 16, 1976 – Zhu Chen born in China, Qatari Chess Grandmaster; in 2001, she became Women’s World Chess Champion, and had previously been World Junior Girls Chess Champion (1994 and 1996). Her FIDE rating as of March 2019 is 2423, and her highest rating was 2548, in 2008. In 2001, she married Qatari Grandmaster Mohammed Ahmed Al-Modiahki, became a Qatari citizen in 2006.
- March 16, 1984 – Mary Kouyoumdijan born, Armenian American composer; she is a co-founder of the annual new-music conference New Music Gathering.
- March 16, 1984 – Aisling Bea born, Irish comedian, writer, and actress; co-writer of the BBC Radio 4 comedy folklore series Micks and Legends, and since 2018, she’s been the co-host on the BBC Radio 2 show, What’s Normal? Bea was a vocal supporter in 2018 of the ‘Repeal the Eighth’ campaign to make abortion legal in Ireland, and also campaigned for the 2015 Irish same-sex marriage referendum.
- March 16, 2003 – Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old American woman involved with the International Solidarity Movement, was killed trying to prevent a Palestinian home from being destroyed by a bulldozer in Rafah.
- March 16, 2015 – In Malaysia, Nurul Izzah Anwar, vice president of the People’s Justice Party and lawmaker, was arrested on charges of sedition, even though members of parliament are immune from prosecution. Her father, Anwar Ibrahim, head of the party, was already in jail (until May, 2018). National Police Chief Khalid Abu Bakar released a statement that she had been detained to assist police in their investigation of an opposition rally and also for making “contemptuous remarks that those in the judiciary system had sold their souls to the devil.” Her family denounced the arrest as “nothing short of intimidation and an abuse of power.” Nurul Izzah’s sister, Nurul Nuha, said Izzah went to police voluntarily to give a statement about the opposition rally she participated in earlier in March, “We maintain that the arrest of our sister is illegal and unconstitutional. We deplore the glaring selective persecution.” Nurul Nuha called for the release of her sister. Khalid said she will be released once police complete their interrogation. Anwar’s arrest was widely seen at home and abroad as politically motivated to eliminate any threats to the ruling coalition, whose popularity has been eroding since 2008 after more than five decades of unquestioned dominance. In his statement, Deputy Asia Director of Human Rights Watch Phil Robertson said, “Prime Minister Najib needs to recognise that every sedition arrest of an opposition political leader is another step towards the destruction of rights-respecting democracy in Malaysia, and bring this campaign of abuse to an end.”
- March 16, 2020 – Candidate Joe Biden, during his debate with Bernie Sanders, announced he would name a woman as his running mate, “I’ll pick a woman to be vice-president. There are a number of women who are qualified to be president tomorrow.” He chose Kamala Harris, who is now the first woman, and first woman of color, to be Vice President of the United States.
- March 16, 2021 – The French Assemblée Nationale, the lower house of the French parliament, unanimously approved a draft law proposed by Emmanuel Macron’s government that would establish an age of “non-consent” at 15, under which a child could not be considered to have willingly engaged in a sexual act. In cases of incest, the age would be set at 18. The first article of the draft law establishes that “any act of sexual penetration of whatever nature” including oral sex, committed by an adult on a person under the age of 15 is considered to be rape. “In this way, no adult will be able to claim consent from a minor under this age of non-consent,” the minister of justice, Éric Dupond-Moretti, told the Assemblée Nationale. The penalty for rape, incestuous or not, is set at 20 years in prison. The draft legislation, which includes new laws covering all acts of sexual assault and abuse of minors, now passes to the upper house, the Sénat, for approval. To avoid criminalising consensual sex between teenagers and young adults, it includes a so-called “Romeo and Juliet” clause that says punishment should only apply if the difference in age between the adult and the person under 15 is at least five years. This clause would not apply in rape or assault cases. The legislation also proposes an extension to the statute of limitation for the rape of a minor in cases where the adult goes on to rape others, and prison sentences of 10 years and a fine of €150,000 for anyone convicted of inciting children under 15 to commit sexual acts on the internet. The bill was given a particular urgency after Camille Kouchner published her book La Familia Grande, which accused her stepfather Olivier Duhamel, a well-known constitutional expert and media commentator, of sexually abusing her twin brother. There was also a national outcry over the handling of the case of “Julie” who was allegedly repeatedly raped by a group of 17 firefighters between her 13th and 15th birthdays, but in which only three of the men were changed with the lesser crime of sexual assault, because the court ruled that “Julie” had the “necessary discernment” to reject the men’s advances, and that investigators had failed to establish that all of the men were aware that Julie was a minor. Given the difficulty of proving that a minor was forcibly or violently coerced, only about one percent of such cases ever resulted in convictions. The “age of non-consent” bill had passed in the Senate, but with cut-off age of 13, so the Senators had to approve the change to age 15, which they did in April 2021. Dupond-Moretti declared, “This is an historic law for our children and our society.”
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Feminist Bonobos
Bonobos and chimpanzees share 98.7% of their DNA with each other and with human beings, making these two species our closest relatives. Bonobos are generally a little smaller and leaner than chimpanzees, and their social structure is quite different. Within a bonobo group, they are usually more peaceful than chimpanzees, and are led by senior females. They also maintain relationships and settle conflicts through sex. However, if two groups of bonobos meet suddenly, they may engage in fighting.
A recent study showed that young female bonobos prepare for motherhood by taking care of babies, even if they’re not related to them – in effect “babysitting,” and this helps to form alliances, which can pay off in times of hostility. The female coalitions will surround a male that is acting aggressively – observers saw one male threatening to kill a baby, and the females banded together to drive him out of the group.
Bonobos live in dense forests south of the Congo River in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Poaching and deforestation are causing a decline in the bonobo population.