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 June 9 through June 15.
The next WOW2 edition will post
on Saturday, June 18, 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.
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.
June is Gay and Lesbian Pride Month
aka LGBTQ+ Pride Month
“All of us who are openly gay are living and writing the history of our movement.
We are no more—and no less—heroic than the suffragists and abolitionists of the 19th century; and the labor organizers, Freedom Riders, Stonewall demonstrators, and environmentalists of the 20th century. We are ordinary people, living our lives, and trying as civil rights activist Dorothy Cotton said, to ‘fix what ain’t right’ in our society.” — Senator Tammy Baldwin
“To say you’re not a feminist means that you think men should have more rights and opportunities than women.” – Taylor Swift
Two Major Wins for U.S. Women in June:
- Equal Pay Act enacted in 1963: “To prohibit discrimination on account of sex in the payment of wages by employers engaged in commerce or in the production of goods for commerce.” (June 10)
- Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972: signed by President Nixon, one of the most important legislation initiatives passed for women and girls since women won the vote in 1920. This legislation guarantees equal access and equal opportunity for female and male students in almost all aspects of our educational systems (June 23)
THIS WEEK IN THE WAR ON WOMEN
has posted, so be sure to go there next, and
catch up on the latest dispatches from the frontlines:
www.dailykos.com/...
Many, many thanks to libera nos, intrepid Assistant Editor of WOW2. Any remaining mistakes are either mine, or uncaught computer glitches in transferring the data from his emails to DK5. And much thanks to wow2lib, WOW2’s Librarian Emeritus.
Trailblazing Women and Events in Our History
Note: All images and audios are below the person or event to which they refer.
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- June 9, 1836 – Elizabeth Garrett Anderson born, first woman to complete medical qualifying exams and first woman physician in Great Britain (1870). After an 1859 lecture by Elizabeth Blackwell on “Medicine as a Profession for Ladies,” she entered training as a surgical nurse – the only woman in the class, she was banned from full participation in the operating room. Rejected by medical schools, she was finally admitted for private study for an apothecary license, then fought to take the exam and get a license. The Society of Apothecaries then amended their regulations so no more women could be licensed. She opened a dispensary in London for women and children in 1866, and studied French so she could apply for a medical degree at the Sorbonne in Paris, which had just begun to accept women as medical students, earning her degree in 1870. By 1872, she had expanded her dispensary into the New Hospital for Women and Children, specializing in treating gynaecological conditions; in 1874, she and Dr. Sophia Jex-Blake co-founded the London School of Medicine for Women, the first teaching hospital in Britain to offer courses to women.
- June 9, 1837 – Anne Isabella Thackeray born, later Lady Ritchie, English writer; her novel Mrs. Dymond contains the earliest English-language use of the proverb “give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for life.”
- June 9, 1843 – Bertha von Suttner born, Austrian novelist and pacifist; published Die Waffen nieder! (Down with Weapons!) in 1889; the first woman to be solely awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (1905).
- June 9, 1860 – The first U.S. “dime novel” is published: Malaseka, The Indian Wife of the White Hunter, written by Mrs. Ann Stevens.
- June 9, 1861 – Mary “Mother” Bickerdyke began serving in the Civil War (1861-1865) as a field agent of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, was a Union field hospital nurse, and a hospital matron (administrator), becoming chief of nursing under the command of General Ulysses S. Grant. She worked in a total of nineteen battles, including the Battle of Vicksburg, the Battle of Shiloh, and Sherman’s March to the Sea, and establishing 300 field hospitals with laundries and food services. After the war, she was a tireless advocate for veterans, becoming a lawyer to help them and their families with legal problems, including getting their pensions. She died at age 84 after a stroke in 1901.
- June 9, 1865 – Helen Marot born, American writer, librarian, labor organizer, and social reformer. She was the head of a private library in Philadelphia specializing in works on social and economic issues, and published Handbook of Labor Literature in 1899. Best known for her investigations, for the U.S. Industrial Commission into the working conditions in Philadelphia’s tailoring trades, and for the New York Association of Neighborhood Workers into child labor, which led to the formation of the New York Child Labor Committee. She co-authored a report with Florence Kelley and Josephine Clara Goldmark which was influential in passage of the 1903 Compulsory Education Act, which raised the end-age of compulsory attendance to age 16. She was the secretary for the New York branch of the Women’s Trade Union League (1906-1913). Marot was a key figure in the organization of the Bookkeepers, Stenographers and Accountants Union of New York, one of the first trade unions for white-collar women, and was the principal organizer of the 1909-1910 strike of shirtwaist and dress makers, called the Uprising of the 20,000, under the banner of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union. She served on the editorial board of the radical journal Masses (1916-1917), then on The Dial (1981-1920), and published Creative Impulse in Industry in 1918.
- June 9, 1896 – Catherine Shouse born, philanthropist and political activist; worked for the Women’s Division of the U.S. Employment Service of the Department of Labor, and was the first woman appointed to the Democratic National Committee in 1925. She was also the editor of the Woman’s National Democratic Committee’s Bulletin (1929-1932), and the first woman to chair the Federal Prison for Women Board. In 1966, she donated her personal property, Wolf Trap Farm, to the National Park Service, which became the Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts, where Shouse served as the founding member until her death in 1994.
- June 9, 1903 – Marcia Davenport born, American author, biographer, music critic and commentator on the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts; noted for the saga, The Valley of Decision, and her memoir, Too Strong for Fantasy.
- June 9, 1909 – Alice Huyler Ramsey, 22-year-old homemaker from Hackensack, New Jersey, becomes the first woman to drive across the U.S., in a Maxwell 30; travels 3,800 miles from Manhattan to San Francisco in 59 days.
- June 9, 1920 – June Braybrooke born, better known by her pen name Isobel English, British novelist, short story writer and playwright; best known for her 1956 novel Every Eye, which was republished in 2000 by Persephone Books.
- June 9, 1921 – Phyllis Wallace born, American economist and pioneer in the study of sex and race discrimination in the workplace. She earned a master’s degree (1944) and Ph.D. (1948) in Economics from Yale University. Wallace worked for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in the 1960s, and was an important contributor to the anti-workplace-discrimination contingencies of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. She was the first African-American woman full professor at the Sloan School of Management at MIT (1974), and the first African American and the first female president of the Industrial Relations Research Association. Author of Pathways to work: Unemployment among black teenage females and Women, minorities and employment discrimination.
- June 9, 1931 – Nandini Satpathy born, Indian politician and Odia language author; a leader in the national youth movement in college, she was severely injured in 1951 when police charged the students during a protest, and was jailed with many others; in 1962, she was elected to the Rajya Sabha (upper house of India’s Parliament) and served two terms; appointed as Minister of Information and Broadcasting in 1966; became Chief Minister of Odisha (1972-1976). She was accused in 1977 of corruption, but her attorney argued several points concerning the manner of the investigation, which led to strengthening the rights of the accused, including the right to an attorney, the right for a woman to be questioned at home with relatives present, and only to be brought to the police station if formally arrested, and the right for women to be searched only by women; over the next 18 years, Satpathy won all of the cases against her.
- June 9, 1931 – Phoebe Burnett Snetsinger born, birder and amateur ornithologist. After receiving a “terminal cancer” diagnosis in 1981, she became famous for her birding life list of 8,398 species (out of about 10,000 in the world) before her death, a world record for the time, often traveling to remote areas, some in politically unstable countries. Her copious field notes included distinctive subspecies. She is killed in 1999, not by cancer, but when the vehicle overturned while she is traveling in Madagascar. Her memoir, Birding on Borrowed Time, was published posthumously (2003).
- June 9, 1936 – Nell Dunn born, English playwright, screenwriter and author; best known for her play Steaming, winner of the 1981 Lawrence Olivier Award for Best New Comedy; her novel Poor Cow and the screenplay for the film version; Up the Junction, a collection of short stories, and her book of interviews, Talking to Women.
- June 9, 1949 – Georgia Neese Clark was confirmed as the first woman U.S. Treasurer (1949-1953).
- June 9, 1949 – Kiran Bedi born, Indian politician and activist, Lieutenant Governor of Puducherry since 2016; the first woman to join the Indian Police Service (1972-2007), rose from police officer to the first woman appointed as a UN civilian police advisor (2003-2005) to her retirement as Director General, Bureau of Police Research and Development; founder of India Vision Foundation (IVF) which advocates for police and prison reform, empowerment of women, and community development; a key leader of the 2011 Indian anti-corruption movement.
- June 9, 1954 – Elizabeth May born in the U.S., leader of the Green Party of Canada, and first Green Party candidate to be elected as a Member of Parliament, for Saanich-Gulf Islands, incumbent since 2011; environmental activist, author, lawyer and politician; Executive Director of the Sierra Club of Canada (1989-2006).
- June 9, 1954 – Patricia Cornwell born, American crime fiction author; known for her Dr. Kay Scarpetta series.
- June 9, 1964 – Gloria Reuben born, Canadian actress, singer, and social activist; best known for playing Jeanie Boulet on the TV medical dram ER (1995-1999), Elizabeth Keckley in the 2012 film Lincoln, and since 2019, the recurring character Eloise Hastings on the series City on a Hill. She is active in raising awareness of the spread of HIV/AIDS in the African American and Latinx communities, and is president of Waterkeeper Alliance, part of a global network of grassroots groups dedicated to protecting potable water. Reuben is also involved with Al Gore’s organization, The Climate Reality Project, and on the leadership council for the RFK Center for Justice and Human Rights.
- June 9, 1977 – Roopa Mishra born, Indian Administrative Service (IAS) District Magistrate and Collector since 2004. She was the first Indian woman to take top honors in the All India Civil Service Examination in 2003.
- June 9, 1981 – Anoushka Shankar born, British-Indian-American sitar player, producer, film composer and activist. She was the youngest and first woman to receive a British House of Commons Shield, and has been nominated for seven Grammy Awards. She is an advocate for animal rights, food security, and has participated in campaigns for One Billion Rising, against violence against women; the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) to reunite refugee families separated during conflicts; and the Circle NGO, working to achieve worldwide equality for women and girls. In 2020, she became the inaugural president of the F-List, a UK group helping to bridge the gender gap in music.
- June 9, 2014 – Actress and LGBT advocate Laverne Cox becomes the first transgender person to appear on the cover of TIME magazine.
- June 9, 2019 – Ali Stroker accepted the Tony Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Musical for the revival of Oklahoma!, becoming the first wheelchair user to win a Tony, at the annual awards for the best of Broadway theatre, given since 1947 by the American Theatre Wing and the Broadway League.
- June 9, 2020 – Protesters marched in Lagos, the largest city in Nigeria, demanding action to combat rape and sexual violence. A coalition of rights groups are urging the government to declare a state of emergency to address the problem after the violent rape and murder of two young women. According to UNICEF, one in four Nigerian girls have been subjected to some form of sexual violence, while Amnesty International says that femicide and rape in Nigeria often go unreported, so perpetrators go unpunished.
- June 9, 2021 – In a courtroom in London’s Old Bailey, the trial began of a 19-year-old man accused of murdering two sisters, Nicole Smallman, 27, and Bibaa Henry, 46, in a park in a north-west London suburb. The sisters had lingered in the park after celebrating Henry’s birthday there with friends, playing music, talking, and goofing around. They were killed in a “frenzied and relentless” attack. Their bodies were then hidden in the park’s undergrowth. According to the prosecution, the 19-year-old accused “planned to sacrifice women so that he could make money” in the belief that a “demon” would deliver a lottery win for him. DNA of the defendant was found on both sisters’ bodies as well as on a bloodstained knife discovered close to them, and evidence was found of his purchase of a set of knives that matched the exact make of knife that appeared to have been used. He was alleged to have attended hospital on the day after the murders took place with fresh cuts to his hand. Police found handwritten notes at Hussein’s home address, including one with a lottery ticket folded inside in which was written the intention to “sacrifice” six women every six months as part of a “bargain” with a demon. The accused denies the two counts of murder and possession of an offensive weapon. The court heard prosecutors anticipate he is likely to claim he was attacked by someone and that he was the victim of a conspiracy. Bibaa Henry was a senior social worker described by her family as being a “a passionate advocate for safeguarding vulnerable children and families.” Nicole Smallman, the youngest of three sisters, was a photographer and a University of Westminster graduate. In October 2021, the defendant was found guilty of both murders, and sentenced to a minimum of 35 years in prison.
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- June 10, 1692 – Bridget Bishop is hanged at Gallows Hill near Salem, Massachusetts, for “certaine Detestable Arts called Witchcraft & Sorceries.”
- June 10, 1720 – Mrs. Clements of Durham, Great Britain, begins selling the first paste-style mustard.
- June 10, 1822 – Lydia White Shattuck born, internationally known botanist, naturalist, and chemist, graduate of Mount Holyoke Seminary (1851); was a faculty member at Holyoke until her retirement in 1888, just months before her death. She taught several science and math subjects: algebra, geometry, physiology, physics, and astronomy.
- June 10, 1835 – Rebecca Latimer Felton born, American reformer, writer, lecturer, and unofficial campaign manager, then widow of William Harrell Felton, U.S. Congressman (D-GA 1875-1881). She was the first woman in the U.S. Senate, but she was appointed and only served for one day, sworn in on November 21, 1922; at age 87 years, 9 months and 22 days, she was also the oldest freshman senator, and to date, still the only woman to represent Georgia in the U.S. Senate. Felton was an advocate for prison reform, woman’s suffrage and educational modernization, but also a white supremacist, and former slave owner. She spoke publicly in favor of lynching.
- June 10, 1854 – Sarah Grand, born Frances Bellenden Clarke, Irish feminist author whose novels and other writings promoted the ideal of the ‘New Woman’ who wants an education and the ability to be self-supporting, and one who will not stay in an oppressive marriage. Grand wrote about the double standard, which condemned women for promiscuity that is tacitly accepted in men; as a student, she was expelled from the Royal Naval School in Twickenham for organizing protests against the Contagious Diseases Act, which persecuted prostitutes as infected women, as the sole cause of the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, subjecting them to indignities such as inspection of their genitals and being held in locked hospital wards.
- June 10, 1895 – Hattie McDaniel born, American actress and singer-songwriter; best known for playing Mammy in Gone with the Wind, for which she became the first African American to win an Academy Award, for Best Supporting Actress. McDaniel was also the first black Oscar winner to appear on a U.S. postage stamp. She recorded blues sides between 1926 and 1929, and was the first African American woman to sing on U.S. Radio, where she became a frequent performer. McDaniel was the best-known homeowner in the black West Adams neighborhood of Los Angeles, and became part of the 1945 ‘Sugar Hill’ lawsuit over the racial restriction covenant that was part of the development of West Adams Heights in 1902. Superior Judge Thurmond Clarke threw the case out of court, nullifying the covenant: “It is time that members of the Negro race are accorded, without reservations or evasions, the full rights guaranteed them under the 14th Amendment to the Federal Constitution. Judges have been avoiding the real issue too long.”
- June 10, 1904 – Lin Huiyin born, also known as Phyllis Lin in the U.S., first modern woman Chinese architect, and also a well-regarded novelist, writer, and poet; educated in England and the U.S., where she had to enroll in the University of Pennsylvania School of Fine Arts in 1924 because the School of Architecture didn’t admit women; she then took graduate courses in stage design at Yale. After returning to China, by 1928, she was co-founder and first faculty with her husband, architect Liang Sicheng, of the Architecture Department of Northeastern University in Shenyang. The University was forced to evacuate in 1931 when the Japanese invaded and took over its province. She and her husband then began doing surveys and restoration work on Beijing’s cultural heritage sites, but had to stop in 1937 and flee south before the invading Japanese. By 1940, Lin Huiyin was in exile with her husband and children in the old town of Lizhuang. While bedridden and suffering from tuberculosis, she was told in 1941 that her younger brother had been killed serving as a combat pilot. After 1949, she and her husband were both professors at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Huiyin was involved in the design of the Chinese national flag, the People’s Republic of China National Emblem, and the Monument to the People’s Heroes for Tiananmen Square, as well as the standardization of Beijing city planning. She died in 1955 of tuberculosis.
- June 10, 1912 – Mary Lavin born, Irish novelist and short story writer; known for her short story collection Tales from Bective Bridge, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1942, and her novels The House in Clewe Street, Mary O’Grady, and A Likely Story.
- June 10, 1916 – Peride Celal born, Turkish novelist, short story and prose writer; worked in the Press Office of the Turkish Embassy in Bern Switzerland during WWII, and at the governmental press and publishing agency after her return to Turkey; she was awarded the 1991 Orhan Kemal Novel Prize for Kurtlar (Wolves).
- June 10, 1922 – Judy Garland born as Frances Gumm; American singer and actress whose career began as a child in a vaudeville act with her older sisters. She was signed as a teenager by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and appeared in over two dozen films for the studio, many co-starring with Mickey Rooney. She is best remembered for her performances in The Wizard of Oz; Meet Me in St. Louis; Easter Parade; A Star is Born; and Judgment at Nuremberg. Garland was a supporter of the Democratic party, and a friend of John F. and Jackie Kennedy. In September, 1963, she with her daughter, June Allyson with her daughter, and Carolyn Jones, held a press conference about the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four young African American girls. They expressed their shock, condemned the violence, and asked for donations to be made for the families of the victims.
- June 10, 1930 – Aranka Siegal born, Czech author, and Holocaust survivor; her children’s book Upon the Head of the Goat, a 1982 Newbery Honor Book, and ALA Notable Children’s Book, is a memoir of her childhood in Hungary before she was sent to Nazi concentration camps during WWII.
- June 10, 1938 – Vasanti N. Bhat-Nayak born, Indian mathematician known for Combinatorics and Graph Theory; was head of the University of Mumbai department of mathematics.
- June 10, 1952 – Kage Baker born, American science fiction and fantasy author; best known for her historical time travel Company series; The Women of Nell Gwynne’s won the 2009 Nebula Award for Best Novella.
- June 10, 1953 – Eileen Cooper born, English contemporary painter and printmaker; elected to the Royal Academy in 2001; first woman elected as Keeper at the Royal Academy in 2011, and Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2016.
- June 10, 1953 – Christine St-Pierre born, French Canadian journalist and Quebec Liberal Party politician; current Member of the National Assembly of Quebec for Acadie, since 2007; journalist for Radio-Canada (1976-2007); served as Minister of Culture, Communications and Status of Women (2007-2014); Minister of International Relations and La Francophonie since 2014.
- June 10, 1954 – Dame Moya Green born, Canadian businesswoman, CEO of the UK’s Royal Mail postal service since 2010, the first woman and first non-Briton to hold the post; President and CEO of Canada Post (2005-2010).
- June 10, 1963 – U.S. Equal Pay Act is signed into law by President Kennedy: “To prohibit discrimination on account of sex in the payment of wages by employers engaged in commerce or in the production of goods for commerce.”
- June 10, 1965 – Susanne Albers born, German theoretical computer scientist and academic; her research is primarily in design and analysis of algorithms; recipient of the Otto Hahn Medal and the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize; in 2014, she was one of the ten inaugural fellows of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science.
- June 10, 1966 – Janis Joplin makes her first appearance with Big Brother and the Holding Company in San Francisco at the Avalon Ballroom.
- June 10, 1969 – Kate Snow born, American television journalist; has been with NBC News since 2010, and anchor since 2015 for the Sunday edition of NBC Nightly News; previously at ABC (2003-2010), CNN (1998-2003), and local television in New Mexico (1995-1998). Snow is a member of the national board of Big Brothers/Big Sisters of America.
- June 10, 1972 – Radmilla Šekerinska born, Macedonian politician; Minister of Defense of the Republic of North Macedonia since 2017; Prime Minister of North Macedonia (first in 2004 and then in 2006).
- June 10, 1976 – Esther Ouwehand born, Dutch Partij voor de Dieren (PvdD – Party for the Animals) politician; current Member of the House of Representatives of the Netherlands since being elected in 2006, when PvdD became the first party to gain seats in a national legislative body with a party platform primarily devoted to animal rights.
- June 10, 1979 – Svetlana Zakharova born, Russian prima ballerina with the Bolshoi Ballet, and an étoile (leading dancer) of the La Scala Theatre Ballet.
- June 10, 1990 – Miriam Makeba returns to South Africa after 31 years in exile. She was the first well-known black musician to leave the country because of apartheid. In retaliation, the government revoked her passport, and she was unable to enter the country for her mother’s funeral in 1960. Her music was banned in South Africa after she testified about apartheid at the United Nations in 1963.
- June 10, 2014 – A video went viral in Egypt showing a crowd of men attacking a woman, pulling and ripping at her clothes in Cairo's Tahrir Square during the previous day’s celebration of the inauguration of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. At the end of the two-minute video the bloodied woman, wearing just a black T-shirt, was carried to a police vehicle as men continue to strike and grope her. President-elect el-Sisi had promised to end the frequent sexual assaults in crowds. Women were forcibly separated from their companions, surrounded by a mob of men. The men then hit the woman, tore off her clothing, and often sexually penetrated her with fingers and objects. Mass sexual assault of women and girls in crowds has been happening since 2005, but escalated after the fall of Hosni Mubarak in 2011. Since November 2012, mob sexual assaults, including rape, have become a regular feature of protests in the vicinity of Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Five hundred cases of mass sexual assault were documented between June 2012 and June 2014. In January 2013, a first attempt to criminalize the attacks failed because the ruling party maintained that women participating in protests were personally responsible for such incidents. In March 2013, the Muslim Brotherhood opposed the United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women, arguing that it would lead to the "disintegration of society." The law was finally changed after a law student at the Cairo University College of Law was sexually assaulted on campus by a large group of men in March 2014, and she had to be escorted to safety by security guards. Amnesty International reported in 2015: "The phenomenon of mob attacks was first documented in May 2005, when groups of men were reportedly hired by authorities [most likely Egyptian security forces] to attack women journalists taking part in a protest calling for the boycott of a referendum on constitutional reform.”
- June 10, 2019 – Missouri Judge Michael Stelzer blocked state officials from closing the St. Louis Planned Parenthood clinic over an ongoing licensing dispute. His ruling prevented Missouri from becoming the first state without an abortion clinic since the Supreme Court’s 1973 landmark ruling in Roe v. Wade. Stelzer wrote that Planned Parenthood's license would remain in effect for now, and directed Missouri health officials to make a decision about renewing the organization's license by June 21. As of January 2021, the St. Louis clinic was still open, but Planned Parenthood had built a new clinic in Fairview Heights, Illinois, which is just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, and not subject to the restrictive laws of Missouri, which include a mandatory 72-hour waiting period before an abortion can be performed.
- June 10, 2020 – Kennedy Mitchum wasn’t expecting much when she emailed Merriam-Webster in May, 2020, to let them know she thought the dictionary’s definition of ‘racism’ was inadequate. Surprisingly, she got a response from editor Alex Chambers, which began an exchange that led to an agreement that the entry should be updated and expanded. Merriam-Webster's first definition of racism was "a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race." Mitchum, a recent graduate from Drake University, lives just a few miles from Ferguson, Missouri, site of the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown. "I kept having to tell them that definition is not representative of what is actually happening in the world," she said. "The way that racism occurs in real life is not just prejudice, it's the systemic racism that is happening for a lot of black Americans." Alex Chambers wrote to her in an email, "This revision would not have been made without your persistence in contacting us about this problem. We sincerely thank you for repeatedly writing in and apologize for the harm and offense we have caused in failing to address this issue sooner."
- June 10, 2021 – An increased number of women in England and Wales had an abortion in 2020, with a rise particularly among women aged 30 and over. A total of 209,917 abortions were reported in 2020, up from 207,384 in 2019. The largest increases in abortion rates by age were among women aged 30 to 34, rising from 16.5 per 1,000 in 2010 to 21.9 in 2020. Experts attributed the increase to a combination of the financial uncertainty caused by the pandemic and the restrictions needed to fight Covid-19, and the availability of abortion treatments that can be self-administered.
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- June 11, 1815 – Julia Margaret Cameron born in Calcutta, British photographer who experimented with soft focus and manipulating the picture during processing.
- June 11, 1847 – Dame Millicent Fawcett born, English academic and woman suffrage leader who was President (1897-1919) of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), the moderate non-violent branch of the movement; a tireless campaigner who also focused on improving women’s opportunities for higher education; co-founder of Newnham College, Cambridge.
- June 11, 1860 – Mary Jane Rathbun born, American marine zoologist, widely recognized as the crustacean authority of her time; she established the basic taxonomic information on Crustacea; Rathbun worked at the Smithsonian for almost 60 years, most of that time serving as the entire Department of Marine Invertebrates, finally resigning her position as superintendent to use her salary to hire an assistant, and continuing her work as a volunteer. She described over 1000 new species/subspecies, and published over 160 scientific papers.
- June 11, 1866 – Addie Waites Hunton born, African American suffragist; race, gender, and peace activist; writer; political organizer; and educator. In 1889, Hunton became the first black woman to graduate from Spencerian College of Commerce. She moved to Alabama to teach at the State Normal and Agricultural College (now Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University). In 1906, after mobs of white men in Atlanta killed at least 25 African-Americans, and destroyed black-owned businesses, she and her family moved to New York state. In 1907, she was appointed as secretary of the National Board of the YWCA, and traveled through the South and Midwest, organizing projects among black students, and recruiting other black women to work for the YWCA. She took her children with her to Europe while she studied at Kaiser Wilhelm University in Strasbourg, Germany. After moving back to the U.S. in 1910, she resumed working for the YWCA. In 1917, she joined a contingent sent by the YMCA to Europe, where she, Kathryn Johnson, and Helen Curtis, the only black women, were assigned to work with 200,000 segregated black troops stationed in France. The black soldiers faced rampant racism by the American Command. She worked for the Services of Supplies sector at Saint Nazaire, and introduced new programs to improve the quality of the soldiers’ lives, including a literacy course. Hunton and Kathryn Johnson wrote a book documenting their experience of war time tragedies and race-relations within American forces, titled Two Colored Women With the American Expeditionary Forces, published in 1920.
- June 11, 1877 – Renée Vivien born as Pauline Mary Tarn, an American-British poet who wrote in French and lived in Paris during the Belle Époque. Vivien was a high-profile lesbian, dubbed “Muse of the Violets” because of her love of the flower. She was as notable for her series of relationships as for her Sapphic verse; the famed French writer Colette was her neighbor from 1906 to 1908, and wrote a controversial portrait of Vivien in The Pure and the Impure. Renée Vivien died at the age of 32 in 1909, the result of drug and alcohol abuse, and anorexia nervosa – she only weighed about 70 pounds at the time of her death.
- June 11, 1880 – Jeannette Rankin born, American social worker, politician, peace and women’s rights activist, first woman elected to U.S. House of Representatives, voted in Congress against declaration of war for both WWI and WWII, casting the only vote against WWII.
- June 11, 1900 – Gloria Hollister Anable born, American explorer, scientist, and conservationist. She was a research associate in the Department of Tropical Research of the New York Zoological Society (now the Wildlife Conservation Society), and specialized in fish osteology. She made record-setting dives in a Bathysphere (a deep-sea submersible) off the coast of Bermuda in the 1930s. During WWII, Anable joined the American National Red Cross where she helped to found the nation's first blood donor center in Brooklyn, and later served as the assistant chief of the Speaker's Bureau of the American Red Cross in Washington, DC. In the 1950s, she and her husband were founders of the Mianus River Gorge Conservation Committee that preserved that river gorge, which would become the Nature Conservancy’s first land project, and is now a National Natural Landmark. Located in the state of New York, the original preserve was 60 acres, but today includes 770 acres, and another 176 acres under conservation easements.
- June 11, 1909 – Natascha Artin Brunswick born in Russia, mathematician, translator; her family left after Russia after the October Revolution in 1917, eventually arriving in Germany; she studied mathematics at the University of Hamburg, graduating in 1930; also a photographic enthusiast who took many pictures of pre-WWII Germany. Because her mother was a Jew who had converted to Christianity in order to marry her father, Natascha became classified as half-Jewish under Nazi law. After she married her former mathematics professor, Emil Artin, he was forced into early retirement from his professorship in 1934. In 1937, the Artins and their two children left Germany for the U.S; he was able to get a teaching position at the University of Notre Dame, but she was classified as an enemy alien, and her camera was confiscated by police in 1942 (by the time it was returned to her, she had lost interest in photography, but her son discovered her photographs decades later, and arranged for their exhibition). Nevertheless, the U.S. Army hired her to teach Russian to soldiers in an Army Specialized Training Program. Emil Artin was hired by Princeton University in 1946; two years later, the couple divorced and he moved back to Germany. In 1959, she married composer Mark Brunswick. She was technical editor and translator for the journal Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics, founded at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, where she worked until 1989.
- June 11, 1909 – Jocelyn Crane Griffin born, American carcinologist (carcinology is the study of crustaceans); she is best known for her research on the fiddler crab, and her work with the Department of Tropical Research of the New York Zoological Society (now the Wildlife Conservation Society). She was a leading expert in ethology, focusing on the behavior of tropical animals, jumping spiders, praying mantises, butterflies and most importantly, fiddler crabs. Her lifelong research on fiddler crabs – researching their morphology, systematics, biogeography, and behavior – was published in her 1975 seminal work, Fiddler Crabs of the World.
- June 11, 1913 – Women in Illinois celebrate winning passage of a state woman suffrage bill so women in the state could vote in presidential elections. According to the Illinois State Journal: “The grace of the women and the gallantry of their guests had undergone no change on account of the sudden political equality that the women were celebrating.” Governor Edward Dunne signed the bill into law on June 26, 1913.
- June 11, 1920 – Hazel Scott born in Trinidad, Jazz/Classical pianist, singer, and civil rights activist; was recognized early as a musical prodigy, and her mother took her to New York City at the age of four. Scott was given scholarships from the age of eight to study at the Juilliard School, and began performing in a jazz band and on the radio by age 16. She was prominent as a jazz singer throughout the 1930s and 1940s. In 1950, she became the first black person to have a TV show, The Hazel Scott Show, featuring variety entertainment. When on tour she refused to perform in segregated venues. Her television show was cancelled a week after she testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee in September 1950. In 1945, she had married U.S. Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. They divorced in 1960, after Scott had moved to Paris in the late 1950s to revive her career, not returning to the United States until 1967. She died of cancer in 1981, survived by her son, Adam Clayton Powell III.
- June 11, 1922 – Jean Sutherland Boggs born, Canadian art historian, specialist in Edgar Degas’ work, academic and civil servant; the first woman director at both the National Gallery of Canada (1966-1976), and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1978-1982); Professor of Fine Arts at Harvard (1976-1979); chair and CEO of Canada Museums Construction Corporation (1982-1985), where she directed the construction of a National Gallery building and the Canadian Museum of Civilization, which opened in 1986, and is now called the Canadian Museum of History; author of Portraits by Degas, and several other books about the painter’s life and work; became an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1973.
- June 11, 1946 – Jennifer Pitman born, British racehorse trainer and author; the first women to train a Grand National winner, Corbiere, in 1983, and had a second Grand National win in 1995 with Royal Athlete. After her retirement from racing, she began writing novels, including On the Edge, Double Deal, The Vendetta, and The Inheritance.
- June 11, 1963 – Alabama Governor George Wallace defiantly stands at the door of Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama to block two black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, from attending the school; later that day, accompanied by federalized National Guard troops, they are able to register. Vivian Malone was enrolled as a junior, so she went on to become the school’s first African American graduate in 1965.
- June 11, 1971 – Liz L. Kendall born, British Labour politician; Member of Parliament for Leicester West since 2010; advocate for the living wage and expanding academy schools programme (secondary schools, mostly state-funded, which are self-governing non-profit charitable trusts), and supporter of worker representation on company boards.
- June 11, 1978 – The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV) proposed by Betsy Warrior, domestic violence survivor and author of Working on Wife Abuse, and Valle Jones, author of “Funds for Battered Women–can co-optation be curbed?” They are joined by others, including members of the National Lesbian Taskforce, and Matilda Blackbear, Executive Director of the White Buffalo Calf Woman Society. The coalition was officially founded on September 22, 1978, and held the first NCADV National Conference in 1980 in Washington DC, attended by over 600 women from 49 states.
- June 11, 1987 – Diane Abbott is elected as the first black woman Member of Parliament in the UK.
- June 11, 2017 – Supporters of LGBTQ+ rights demonstrated in 100 U.S. cities, against the Trump administration’s rollbacks of gains made during the Obama administration, including federal guidelines advising school districts to let transgender students use bathrooms corresponding to their gender identity. Activists also pointed to the number of prominent members of the administration who were openly opposed to LGBTQ rights, including VP Mike Pence, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price. At the Equality March in Washington DC, there were about 200,000 participants. Sarah Kate Ellis, president of GLAAD, noted in her rally speech that Trump had declined to issue a proclamation in honor of Pride Month, and said, "If you look at their prioritization, we're really low on it. There absolutely is a resistance aspect to this march."
- June 11, 2019 – The Bohemian Club, an elite male-only private club, was founded in 1872. Its membership is confidential, but U.S. Presidents and Supreme Court Justices have been members in the past. The club has never admitted women as members. It holds an annual retreat at its private property, Bohemian Grove in Sonoma County, which is shrouded in secrecy. The country had approved, for the last 14 years, a contract for sheriff’s deputies to provide security for the event, but in 2019, Supervisor Shirlee Zane of the Sonoma County’s Board of Supervisors raised the issue, “How can we contract tax-funded services with a club that openly discriminates against women?” She added, “Women’s rights are being shredded throughout the country and we are kept out of decision-making. This is another way it’s happening in our own backyard.” Supervisor Lynda Hopkins, the first woman to represent the district which includes Bohemian Grove, said, “Bohemian Grove has always been a strange anachronism in my district. It’s 2,700 acres of mystery I haven’t been allowed to set foot on.” Nevertheless, the supervisors voted to once again provide security for the retreat, because the short time between the vote and the retreat, set to begin July 10, raised safety concerns if the club were unable to contract private security. "We wouldn't be up here even having this discussion if the Bohemian Club said no African-Americans allowed, no gays allowed, no Latinos allowed, no immigrants allowed or no Jews allowed," Zane said.
- June 11, 2020 – Jane Austen’s House Museum in Chawton, UK, faced becoming another victim of the coronavirus pandemic. Lizzie Dunford, the museum’s director, said it received no regular public funding, and depended on visitors and supporters. When the doors were closed by the national lockdown in March, 2020, the museum lost all its income. Dunford said there was “a very real risk” that the museum would close permanently before the end of 2020, and its collections of first editions, letters, and objects owned by the Austen family dispersed. Most of the 16 staff members are already on furlough, though a few remained to manage the museum’s online shop. The museum needed emergency funding, and Dunford appealed to “everyone worldwide who has ever escaped reality with one of Jane’s sparkling novels to help ensure the survival of the house that saw them first emerge.” The appeal did get a worldwide response, and the museum was able to reopen May 19, 2021. The museum is having live events again, but also continues its virtual tours and other online events.
- June 11, 2021 – In the UK, the government committed to raising the minimum legal age of marriage to 18 in England and Wales. Currently, children age 16 and 17 can marry with parental consent, but a coalition of charities has warned that this legal loophole is being exploited to coerce young people into child marriage. A letter to campaigners from the Ministry of Justice, shared with the Guardian newspaper, said the government was committed to raising the minimum legal age to 18 “as soon as legislative opportunity arises.” The news came as former chancellor Sajid Javid told the Times newspaper he would introduce a private member’s bill making it illegal for under-18s to marry. In May, 2021, the four co-chairs of the coalition Girls Not Brides UK had written a letter to the prime minister warning that the current law on forced marriage did not go far enough to protect young people. Conservative MP Pauline Latham recently held meetings with ministers, including Justice Secretary Robert Buckland, to discuss the issue, and a proposal for a new criminal offence for adults who aid, abet, or procure marriages for children. Lord Wolfson, a justice minister, wrote to groups involved in the campaign to end child marriage, including the Iranian and Kurdish women’s rights charity IKWRO; Karma Nirvana, which is against forced marriage; Forward, an African women-led organisation working to end gender violence; and the Independent Yemen Group: “The government supports raising the legal age for marriage in England and Wales to protect vulnerable children living here … making sure children and young people are both protected and supported as they grow and develop in order to maximise their potential life chances. This includes having the opportunity to remain in education or training until they reach the age of 18. Child marriage and having children too early in life can deprive them of these important life chances.”
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- June 12, 1161 (traditional day) – Constance born, daughter of Duke Conan IV and Margaret of Huntingdon. At age five, she became the Duchess of Brittany when Henry II of England invaded Brittany, and forced her father to abdicate in her favor, so he could arrange the betrothal of Constance to his son Geoffrey. She spent the rest of her youth at the English court. In 1181, Constance, age 20, was forced to marry Geoffrey, but in 1186, he was trampled to death during a tournament, leaving Constance as the effective ruler of Brittany. In 1191, King Richard I proclaimed Constance’s son Arthur, his nephew, as his heir in a treaty signed with Philip II of France. Constance began including her son in the government of the Duchy in 1196, but King Richard had other plans for the Duchy and summoned her to Bayeau, where he arranged for her to be abducted by Ranulf, Earl of Chester (who already styled himself as the Duke of Brittany, although this was never accepted in Brittany.) She was imprisoned at Saint-James de Beuvron, and the rumor was spread that it was for matrimonial reasons. This sparked rebellions in Brittany by her loyal subjects, and Arthur was sent to Brest. Richard eventually bowed to growing pressure, and had Constance released in 1198. Back in Brittany, the Duchess had the “marriage” annulled, and Arthur became her co-ruler. In 1199, she married Guy of Thouars. In 1201, Constance died at age 40, probably of complications from the birth of twin daughters.
- June 12, 1686 – Marie-Catherine Homassel-Hecquet born, French writer who wrote under the pen name “Madame H―” a pamphlet biography of the feral child Marie-Angélique Memmie Le Blanc (also known as the Wild Girl of Champagne) called Histoire d’une jeune fille sauvage trouvée dans les bois à l’âge de dix ans, which was translated several years later into English as An Account of a Savage Girl. The girl is believed to have survived in the forest for ten years, from about ages 9 to 19, before being captured by villagers in Songy, Champagne. At least one researcher found some evidence that she may have been a Native American of the Meskwaki (Fox) people, who re-learned human speech, and learned to read and write as an adult, a feat unique among long-term feral children.
- June 12, 1802 – Harriet Martineau born, English sociologist, journalist, abolitionist, and author of numerous books and essays, known as the first woman sociologist and for her feminist perspective; she earned enough to support herself entirely by writing, rare for a woman in the 19th century.
- June 12, 1827 – Johanna Spyri born, Swiss children’s book author; best known for Heidi.
- June 12, 1889 – Lilian Jeannette Rice born, American architect, noted for the California Spanish Colonial Revival style; lead planner of the Rancho Santa Fe development in San Diego County CA (1922-1927), opened her own firm in 1928, became one of the few women members of the American Institute of Architecture (ALA) when she joined the San Diego chapter in 1931; several of her employees were women, including architect Olive Chadeayne; Rice died of ovarian cancer in 1938 at age 49.
- June 12, 1892 – Djuna Barnes born, American author, journalist, playwright, illustrator and artist; started in 1913 as a freelance journalist and illustrator for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and quickly became a very busy feature reporter and interviewer; published her illustrated volume of poetry, The Book of Repulsive Women, in 1915; sent by McCall’s magazine to Paris, she lived there from 1921 to 1931, and wrote A Book, published in 1923, and began her novel Nightwood, published in 1936, a classic of lesbian fiction, also considered an important book in modernist literature; in the 1940s, she drank heavily and did little work, often making ends meet with donations from friends, but swore off alcohol in 1950, and wrote her verse play The Antiphon and much poetry, in spite of being ravaged by arthritis; became increasingly reclusive; elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1961.
- June 12, 1895 – Eugénie Brazier born, French chef, who developed Lyonnaise cuisine. In 1921, she opened her first restaurant, La Mère Brazier, in Lyon. Brazier was the first person and first woman hold six Michelin stars simultaneously, three Michelin stars at two restaurants, after she opened a second restaurant in Col de la Luère. She held this record alone for 36 years. Noted nouvelle cuisine chef Paul Bocuse was one of her students. Eugénie Brazier Prizes include the Grand Prize for a cookbook by a woman or about women’s cooking, and a prize for best illustrations or photographs in a cookbook
- June 12, 1899– Anni Albers born, textile artist and printmaker, had the first textile art show at the Museum of Modern Art (1949).
- June 12, 1908 – Marina Semyonova born, Russian ballet dancer, first Soviet-trained prima ballerina, named a People’s Artist of the USSR.
- June 12, 1912 – Eva Crane born, earned a doctorate in nuclear physics, but abandoned physics to become an expert on bees as a researcher, historian, archivist, editor, and author; founder of the International Bee Research Association (1949). Author of Bees and Beekeeping: science, practice and world resources; and The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting.
- June 12, 1917 – Ansuyah Ratiul Singh born, South African physician, community worker, novelist, and playwright. Earned her medical degree from the University of Edinburgh in 1944, and returned to South Africa in 1946. She became part of the Passive Resistance Movement in Durban, and founded a series of clinics to serve the poor. In 1956, she was the first Indian woman appointed to the Natal Provincial Administration, and in 1962, she earned a diploma in Public Health from the University of Natal. Singh also wrote novels, including Behold the Earth Mourns, considered the first novel published by an Indian South African writer, an historical novel about the struggle against apartheid. She lectured to students on health and family planning, the Arts, and the role of women in the Indian community.
- June 12, 1918 – Georgia Louise Harris Brown born, the second African American woman to become a licensed architect in the U.S. Also the first black woman to earn a degree in architecture from the University of Kansas, and the only black member of the Chicago chapter of Alpha Alpha Gamma (women architects and allied women professionals.) Before she became a licensed architect, Brown worked for Kenneth Roderick O’Neal (1945-1949); when she became licensed on 1949, she went to work for Frank J. Kornacker & Associates, and took evening classes in civil engineering. In 1953, she left for Brazil, where there were fewer racial barriers in her field. Brown learned to speak Portuguese by studying with a friend, and had permanently moved to São Paulo by 1954, where she started a design firm, Escandia Ltda. She was the project manager and designer for a large complex in Osasco, did a project for Pfizer Pharmaceutical Corporation in Guarulho, designed a Jeep factory in San Bernardo, a shipping facility for Siemens, and a Kodak Brasileire Comerico film factory. Harris Brown also designed several homes for wealthy Brazilians. She retired to Washington DC in 1995, and died in 1999.
- June 12, 1919 – Uta Hagen born in Germany, German-American actress; blacklisted during the McCarthy era, she became better known as a highly influential acting teacher and author of Respect for Acting and A Challenge for Actors; elected to the American Theatre Hall of Fame in 1981. Hagen continued acting and teaching until 2001 when she suffered a stroke, and died in 2004.
- June 12, 1922 – Margherita Hack born, influential Italian astrophysicist and author, who contributed to the spectral identification of many stars; first woman administrator of the Trieste Astronomical Observatory (1964-1987), member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. She was a vocal advocate for civil rights and equality, and a member of the Italian Union of Rationalist Atheists and Agnostics, and battled the strictures of the Vatican. She also launched a successful campaign against construction of nuclear power plants in Italy.
- June 12, 1924 – Grete Dollitz born in Germany, emigrated to the U.S. with her family in 1935; American classical guitarist, educator, and radio host of Hour With the Guitar. In February, 2013, she published Letters from the Depression: Part 1, the first year of her family’s immigration told through their letters. She died at age 88 in May 2013.
- June 12, 1925 – Gladys Hansen born, American librarian, curator of the Museum of the City of San Francisco; San Francisco’s longtime city archivist, and a renowned expert on the city’s history, especially the 1906 earthquake and fires. Using old records, letters, and newspaper accounts, she put together a list of missing casualties, first on three-by-five cards and later on computers. Her research uncovered over 3,000 people who died in the quake or the fires afterwards, a much higher number than the official list of 478 dead. Co-author, with former San Francisco Fire Chief Emmet Condon, of Denial of Disaster, published in 1989, arguing that the city fathers had covered up the real death toll because admitting such a high number was bad for business.
- June 12, 1929 – Brigid Brophy born, British author, critic, social reformer, and animal rights activist; Hackenfeller’s Ape and Mozart the Dramatist.
- June 12, 1929 – Anne Frank born, Dutch author and WWII Holocaust victim; known for The Diary of Anne Frank.
- June 12, 1930 – Barbara Harris born, American minister and Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, the first woman ordained a bishop in the Anglican Communion.
- June 12, 1931 – Rona Jaffee born, American novelist, noted for controversial book Mazes and Monsters (1981) about possible dangers of fantasy role-playing games; hired in 1960s by Editor Helen Gurley Brown to write cultural pieces for Cosmopolitan magazine. In 1995, she created the Rona Jaffee Foundation, which gives the Rona Jaffee Foundation Writer’s Awards, exclusively for women authors, in Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry categories.
- June 12, 1932 – Mimi Coertse born, South African operatic soprano.
- June 12, 1935 – Ella Fitzgerald, age 17, makes her first recordings: “Love and Kisses” and “I’ll Chase the Blues Away.”
- June 12, 1941 – Lucille Roybal-Allard born, American Democratic politician, U.S. House of Representatives for three different California districts since 2003, the first Mexican-American woman elected to U.S. Congress; currently serving the 40th District; California State Assemblywoman (1986-1992); currently on House Appropriations Committee, Homeland Security Subcommittee and Labor/Health/Human Services/Education and Related Agencies Subcommittee; member of Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and Co-Chair with Representative Pramila Jayapal (Democrat-Washington) of the Women’s Working Group on Immigration Reform.
- June 12, 1946 – Catherine Bréchignac born, French physicist, co-founder of the field of cluster physics; President of CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research) from 1997 to 2002; commander of the Légion d’honneur, and “secrétaire perpétuel” of the Académie des sciences since 2011.
- June 12, 1948 – The Women’s Armed Services Integration Act is signed into law allowing women to serve as regular members of the United States armed forces. Prior to this they could only serve during times of war.
- June 12, 1950 – Little League Girls Baseball Day – In the spring of 1950, 13-year-old “Tubby” Johnston signs up to try-out for the King’s Dairy Team of the Knights of Columbus League in New York. “Tubby” makes the team, but then confesses to the coach that “he” is really Katherine Johnston, who had talked her mother into cutting off her braids, and then dressed like a boy for the tryouts. The coach said, “You know, we don’t have rules for girls and you’re really good so we’d like to have you on the team.” She played that entire season. But then the Little League organization instituted the “Tubby Rule,” banning girls from the league. The ban stayed on the books until 1974, when the National Organization for Women (NOW) backed Maria Pepe in a discrimination lawsuit, in which the New Jersey Superior Court ruled that Little League must allow girls to try out.
- June 12, 1957 – Geri Allen born, African American jazz pianist and composer, who was also an associate professor of music and the director of the Jazz Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh. She was the first woman to receive Soul Train’s Lady of Soul Award for jazz album of the year in 1995.
- June 12, 1958 – Margaret Atieno Ogola born, Kenyan novelist and physician, noted for The River and the Source, which won the 1995 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best first book, and its sequel, I Swear by Apollo. She was the medical director of Cottolengo Hospice, for orphans with HIV and AIDS. She died of cancer at age 53 in 2011.
- June 12, 1967 – Loving Day: Mildred and Richard Loving are each sentenced to a year in prison for marrying each other, a violation of Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924, because she is black and he is white. They bring suit, and the U.S. Supreme Court makes a unanimous decision in Loving v. Virginia that the Virginia law is unconstitutional, making all race-based restrictions on marriage in the U.S. unconstitutional.
- June 12, 1981 – Afua Hirsch born in Norway, daughter of a British father and an Akan mother from Ghana; British writer, journalist, broadcaster, and former barrister. She was a legal correspondent for The Guardian newspaper, and the Social Affairs and Education Editor for Sky News (2014-2017). She hosts a radio programme on LBC (London Broadcasting Company). Her book, Brit: On Race, Identity and Belonging, was published in 2018.
- June 12, 1992 – Chanel Miller born, American writer and artist; she was “Emily Doe” the survivor of sexual assault by Brock Turner in 2015. Her victim impact statement at his sentencing hearing went viral, and her eloquence sparked national outrage over the sentencing of her assailant to only six month in prison, as well as a successful campaign to get the presiding judge recalled by voters two years later. In 2019, she relinquished her anonymity and released her memoir Know My Name. Her book won the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography.
- June 12, 2018 – In the primaries for the 2018 U.S. Midterm Elections, women ran for office in record numbers. In Democratic primaries for the U.S. House of Representatives with least one woman, one man and no incumbent, Democratic women were the top vote-getters in 71% of these primaries, compared with 35% of Republican women running in such races. Of the pro-choice Democratic women candidates who were endorsed by the influential group Emily’s List for U.S. Congressional seats, and for state legislatures and other offices, 104 out of 123 of the women won their primaries. Women have been the biggest presence in liberal Democratic ‘resistance’ groups, from the Women’s March to Indivisible to #MeToo, and they channeled their outrage over the election of Donald Trump into campaigning, fundraising, organizing, and voting for women candidates.
- June 12, 2020 – The Trump administration's Department of Health and Human Services finalized a rule that will roll back health care protections for transgender people. The rule, established along with the Affordable Care Act, prevents health care providers from denying transgender patients health care by banning discrimination on the basis of "gender identity." When HHS announced its plans to scrap this policy, advocacy groups and lawmakers alike began criticizing the move as damaging to a vulnerable group of Americans. The new policy will allow health care providers to further lean on “religious” exemptions. HHS claimed the move "will eliminate mass confusion that was unleashed by the Obama-era decision." The nonprofit Human Rights Campaign quickly announced a legal challenge to the rule.
- June 12, 2021 – In July 1995, during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a photograph made newspaper front pages around the world. It showed a woman in a white skirt and red cardigan hanging from a tree in a wood outside Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia. The caption read: “The Hanging Woman.” The photograph became the symbol of Srebrenica, where the worst genocide in Europe since WWII had happened just before the photograph was taken. She was one more nameless victim in a conflict that left 100,000 dead, 20,000 to 50,000 women and girls raped, and about 2.7 million people displaced before it ran its barbaric course. Earlier in June, 2021, former Bosnian Serb warlord General Ratko Mladić, the so-called “butcher of Bosnia” who was behind the Srebrenica massacre, lost his appeal against a life sentence for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, and Guardian/Observer newspaper reporter Kim Willsher was moved to recount again her search of many months to discover who “The Hanging Woman” had been. Her name was Ferida Osmanovic, the daughter of farmers, and she was 31-years-old. Her husband Selman, a locksmith, was one of the estimated 8,000 men and boys taken from Srebrenica by Bosnian Serb forces to be slaughtered. In April 1996, Willsher, with photographer Lynn Hilton, travelled to a village just outside Tuzla in north-east Bosnia. There they found Ferida and Selman’s orphaned children, Damir, 13, and Fatima, 10, who were staying with their paternal grandmother and other relatives. Willsher said it was one of the saddest interviews she have ever done. Fatima told her: “We know our mother hanged herself. We went to her grave, but it had no name, just ‘Hanged’ on the wooden headboard. So we wrote her name on it in felt-tip pen.” Damir remembered the hours before his mother disappeared: “It was our second night at the camp and our mother put us to bed. We were sleeping on the Tarmac with blankets. She said she loved us, said good night, and lay down next to us. Then I woke up at midnight and she wasn’t there.” Ferida, overcome with grief at losing her husband, had slipped away to the nearby wood, and plaited her black cloth belt and brown shawl into a noose. At 7:30 the next morning, her body was found by a group of children. The photograph was taken by freelance Croatian photographer Darko Bandic, who did not find out who she was until much later. Emir Suljagić, director of the Srebrenica Memorial and a former Bosnian education minister, had taken refuge in Srebrenica in the early 1990s and only escaped the slaughter because he was employed as a UN interpreter. He welcomed the Mladić appeal ruling, but said it did not “close the chapter” for Bosniaks. “He did not carry out the cleansing of Srebrenica alone. When are we going to deal with the people who did his bidding? Everyone knows who they are, the Bosnian judiciary knows who they are,” he said. “These guys are mass murderers, they are knee-deep in blood and they are walking about as free men. It means that Bosnian people still don’t feel entirely safe – and who can blame them?” Willsher ended her report, “There were so many other horrors in the country; this story was not even the worst that Lynn and I reported on, but it was one of the most heartbreaking and it felt important: journalism is, after all, about naming the nameless. She was not ‘The Hanging Woman’: her name was Ferida Osmanovic.”
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- June 13, 1752 – Fanny Burney born, became Madame d’Arblay, English author of journals, diaries, and novels; Evelina is a landmark in development of the novel of manners; she wrote a first person account of undergoing a mastectomy without anesthesia.
- June 13, 1840 – Augusta Lundin born, the first international Swedish fashion designer, who introduced Parisian clothing construction methods to Sweden. In 1886, she was commissioned by the Reformed Dress Society to design a more healthful form of dress for women. Lundin designed a style of loose dress without a corset or a bustle. She employed only women until 1910, and instituted a 12-hour work shift, with a two-week summer vacation, the first Swedish employer to do so.
- June 13, 1859 – Christine Terhune Herrick born, American author and journalist; published many books on cooking and household management; noted contributor to Harper’s Bazaar.
- June 13, 1863 – Lucy Christiana born, Lady Duff-Gordon, British fashion designer, known professionally as Lucile; she was the first British-based designer to win international acclaim, opening branches of her London house in Paris, New York, and Chicago. She introduced the ‘mannequin parade’ (a precursor to the fashion show), and trained the first professional models, as well as popularizing less restrictive corsets, pared-down lingerie, and slits for walking more freely in skirts.
- June 13, 1872 – Chrystal MacMillan born, Scottish women’s rights activist, pacifist, and one of the first British women called to the Bar, in 1924; member of the Scottish Federation of Women’s Suffrage Societies, campaigning for women’s suffrage, and organizer and delegate to the pro-peace 1914 Women’s Congress in The Hague, and a delegate to the International Congress of Women in Zürich in 1919, which issued a strong condemnation of the harsh terms imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles. She was also the second woman member of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society. In her will, she left bequests for the Open Door International for the Economic Emancipation of the Woman Worker, and to the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene.
- June 13, 1873 – Alice Stebbins Wells born, one of the first American-born women police officers in the U.S. She was hired in 1910 by the city of Los Angeles, California. She was a graduate of Oberlin College and Hartford Theological Seminary, where a study she conducted concluded there was a large need for woman officers. Wells joined the Los Angeles Police Department after a long battle, aided by many citizens who supported her or that she persuaded. With such a huge community reaction, the mayor, police commissioner, and the Los Angeles city council reluctantly allowed Wells to become the first policewoman in the LAPD, but she was classified under civil service. She was sworn in on September 12, 1910. Previously, women had only been hired as matrons and guards in the women’s sections of jails. She was issued a telephone call box key, a police rule book, a first aid book, and the "Policewoman's Badge Number One." However, she had to hand sew her police uniform, the first police woman's uniform in the U.S. Wells was assigned to work with the LAPD's first juvenile officer, and an order was issued by the force that young women could now only be questioned by female police officers. Wells began her career supervising skating rinks and dance halls, as well as interacting with female members of the public. Although Wells was a sworn officer, she was not entitled to carry a gun, as male officers were. Two years after Wells joined the force, two other women were sworn in as officers, but all female officers were still classified under civil service. Sixteen other cities and several foreign countries hired women as police officers as a direct result of Wells' activities. In 1915, she founded and was the first president of the International Policewomen's Association, traveling throughout America and Canada to promote women officers. She also founded the Los Angeles Social Hygiene Society, and supported sex education in Los Angeles public schools. The University of California created the first course dedicated to the work of female police officers in 1918, and Wells was made the first president of the Women's Peace Officers Association of California in 1928. In 1934, she became the LAPD historian, and by 1937 there were 39 female officers in the LAPD, and five reserves. Wells remained the department's historian until she retired on November 1, 1940. She is remembered for having "fought for the idea that women, as regular members of municipal police departments, are particularly well-qualified to perform protective and preventative work among juveniles and female criminals." Wells died at age 84 in 1957, and her funeral was attended by high-ranking officers from the LAPD, and a ten-woman honor guard.
- June 13, 1873 – Karin Swanström born, Swedish actress, theatre company founder, silent film producer and director. She founded and ran the Karin Swanström Theater Company (1904-1921), then began acting in silent films. In 1923, she became head of production at Bonnierfilm, and directed her first film, for AB Svensk Filmindustri. She starred in several silent films, and directed three more films between 1923 and 1926, then returned to the stage (1926-1931), but still made some appearances in silent films. From 1934 to 1941, she again worked for AB Svensk Filmindustri, this time as producer, artistic adviser, and then as production manager and co-head of production with her husband, Stellan Claësson. In 1942, Swanström died in Stockholm. Noted for her direction of Flickan i frack (Girls in Tails).
- June 13, 1875 – Miriam “Ma” Ferguson born, American politician, first woman Governor of Texas (1925-1927 and 1933-1935). She ran after her husband, the former governor, was barred from public office. During her first term, she followed through on her campaign promise to pass a law forbidding anyone to participate in public activity while wearing a mask. Although the courts eventually overturned the anti-mask law, it did accomplish Ferguson’s goal of undermining the political power of the Ku Klux Klan in Texas.
- June 13, 1879 – Lois Weber born, American silent film director, actress, screenwriter, and producer; an important and prolific director of the silent film era, credited with directing at least 135 films, writing 114 screenplays, and acting in 100 films; pioneer of the split screen technique in her 1913 film Suspense; early experimenter with sound; first woman to direct a full-length feature film, The Merchant of Venice (1914); in 1917, the first woman director to own a film studio, Lois Weber Productions (1917-1921). Weber discovered silent film actress Billy Dove, and screenwriter-director Frances Marion. She was the only woman member of the Motion Picture Directors Association (1915-1936), which was replaced by the Screen Directors Guild, an official craft union.
- June 13, 1881 – Mary Antin born in the Russian Empire, American author and immigration rights activist, known for her autobiography The Promised Land, about her life in Czarist Russia, immigration, and assimilation into American culture.
- June 13, 1890 – Osceola Macarthy Adams born, one of the first African American actresses on Broadway, appearing in The Emperor Jones with Paul Robeson and in Arthur Miller's The Crucible. As a director, she helped start the careers of Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier. She was also a drama teacher, and clothing designer.
- June 13, 1893 – Dorothy L. Sayers born, British author, poet, and playwright; noted for the Lord Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane mystery novel series.
- June 13, 1902 – Carolyn Eisele born, American mathematician and historian of mathematics, professor of mathematics at Hunter College for almost 50 years.
- June 13, 1908 – Maria Elena Vieira da Silva born, Portuguese-French abstract artist.
- June 13, 1908 – Anne of Green Gables, by L. M. Montgomery, is published.
- June 13, 1931 – Nora Kovach born, Hungarian-American ballerina; in 1953, she and her husband were the first highly publicized dancers who defected from the Soviet bloc to the West.
- June 13, 1935 – Jeanne-Claude born as Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon in Morocco, where her father, a French general, was stationed. French artist, and collaborator with her husband, Christo Javacheff, better known as Christo, from 1961 on.
- June 13, 1937 – Eleanor Holmes Norton born, civil rights activist, feminist and politician; since 1991, U.S. Delegate for the District of Columbia in the U.S. House of Representatives (a non-voting, at-large position because Congress maintains supreme authority over the city, and may even overturn local laws); Chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (1977-1981); Assistant Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (1965-1970); in 1970, Norton represented sixty female employees of Newsweek, who filed a claim with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission because Newsweek only allowed men to be reporters, and she won the case.
- June 13, 1944 – Dame Christine Beasley born, British nurse and National Health Service (NHS) administrator; held a range of senior posts with broad experience if policy development and leadership, including Head of Development with the Directorate of Health and Social Care and Director of Nursing, and NHS Human Resources & Organisational Development; established the London Standing Conference, contributing to improvements in service and clinical practice; appointed Chief Nursing Office for England in 2004; became Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2008 Birthday Honours.
- June 13, 1949 – Ann Druyan born, American documentary screenwriter and producer, co-author of the 1980 documentary series Cosmos; Creative Director of NASA’s Voyager Interstellar Message Project, the golden discs affixed to both the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft.
- June 13, 1949 – Ulla Schmidt born, Social Democratic Party of Germany politician; Vice-President of the German Bundestag (2013-2017); Federal Minister of Health (2005-2009); Federal Minister of Health and Social Security (2001-2002); Federal Minister of Health and Social Security (2002-2005); North Rhine-Westphalia Member of the Bundestag since 2009.
- June 13, 1954 – Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala born, Nigerian economist; first woman Minister of Finance in Nigeria (2011-2015); Managing Director of the World Bank (2007-2011); Nigerian Minister of Foreign Affairs (2006-2006); current chair of the board for Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), and for African Risk Capacity (ARC).
- June 13, 1955 – Leah W. Sears born in Heidelberg Germany to a U.S Army family; American jurist; Chief Justice of the Georgia Supreme Court (2005-2009), the first African-American woman Chief Justice in the U.S.; Associate Justice of the Georgia Supreme Court (1992-2005), the first woman and youngest person to sit on Georgia’s Supreme Court; first black woman Superior Court judge (1988-1992) in Georgia.
- June 13, 1963 – Audrey Niffenegger born, American writer, artist and academic; professor of Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago; best known for her novel, The Time Traveler’s Wife.
- June 13, 1963 – Dame Sarah Connolly born, English mezzo-soprano, best known for her baroque and classical roles; appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2017 Birthday Honours for her services to music. She spoke out publicly against Brexit in 2016.
- June 13, 1964 – Kathy Burke born, English comedian, playwright, theatre director, and actress; she directed her first play, Mr. Thomas, at the Old Red Lion Theatre in 1990; known for playing the semi-regular role of Magda in the BBC series Absolutely Fabulous.
- June 13, 1969 – Virginie Despentes born, French author, screenwriter, and director; member of the Société littéraire des Goncourt (Goncourt Literary Society) since 2016; her novel Apocalypse bébé won the 2010 Renaudot prize; she made her directorial debut in 2000 with the film, Baise-moi, adapted from her novel, a crime thriller with elements of the rape and revenge genre, considered an example of the ‘New French Extremity’ because of its graphic violence and explicit sex scenes.
- June 13, 1969 – Laura Kightlinger born, American comedian and writer; consulting producer and writer on the TV series Will & Grace; created, wrote, directed, produced, and starred in TV series The Minor Accomplishments of Jackie Woodman (2006-2007).
- June 13, 1972 – Natalie MacMaster born, Canadian Cape Breton fiddle prodigy who has been performing since she was nine. She recorded her first album when she was 16, and has begun adding traditional music from Scotland and Ireland to her repertoire, as well as American bluegrass. In 2006, she was made a member of the Order of Canada, and in 2020, she was made a member of the Order of Nova Scotia.
- June 13, 1986 – Lea Verou born, Greek Software developer, front end web developer, speaker, and author; currently a Research Assistant at MIT CSAIL, in the Haystack group, and an Invited Expert W3C CSS Working Group. She is the author of CSS Secrets.
- June 13, 2012 – Women’s rights activist Manal al Sharif writes a letter, which is signed by hundreds of Saudi women, urging Saudi King Abdullah to grant women the right to drive.
- June 13, 2018 – London Breed, former San Francisco Board of Supervisors president, was declared the winner of the race for mayor of San Francisco, after eight days of ballot-counting all but eliminated rival candidate Mark Leno, who conceded the race. Breed, age 43, thus became San Francisco’s second woman mayor, after Senator Dianne Feinstein (Democrat-California), and the city’s first black woman mayor. Leno would have been San Francisco’s first openly gay mayor. All three frontrunners were Democrats. Breed briefly took over as mayor when Mayor Ed Lee (Democrat) died of a heart attack in December. She served out the remainder of Lee’s term. In November 2019, she was reelected, winning just over 70% of the vote.
- June 13, 2020 – An economics professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University proposed a solution to China’s very serious gender imbalance – polyandry, women having multiple husbands. Women’s rights activists immediately pointed out that this would be a bad bargain for women, because more husbands would mean more work, since globally woman do two-and-a-half times as much unpaid care and domestic work as men. But China’s “one-child” policy from 1979 to 2015, and the traditional higher value placed on sons over daughters has resulted in a shortage of 30 to 40 million women, making it difficult for many Chinese men to find wives, and causing a demand for trafficked women from outside China. Human Rights Watch has documented bride trafficking in Myanmar, where each year hundreds of women and girls are deceived into traveling to China through false promises of employment, only to be sold to Chinese families as brides for between $3,000 to $13,000 USD, and held in sexual slavery, often for years. Most were pressured to become pregnant as quickly as possible; some were compelled to undergo forced fertility treatment. Those who had children and were lucky enough to escape could usually only do so by leaving their children behind. Several of the women interviewed had been trafficked more than once. This type of bride trafficking to China has spread across Asia, with cases documented in at least eight countries.
- June 13, 2021 – Discussions at the June 11-13 meeting in Carbis Bay, Cornwall, of the G7 group of nations, representatives from the European Union, as well as invited guest countries including Australia, India, and the Republic of Korea, led to some agreement on multilateral action on many of the issues of international global concern that deeply affect the lives and futures of women and girls, including building forward from the COVID-19 pandemic, equitable access to vaccines and medicines, and addressing climate change. Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and Executive Director of UN Women, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, said: “This is the moment … to ensure that women are set at the heart of recovery decisions and processes that ensure their rights, meet their needs, and recognize their contributions ... UN Women supports the G7 Gender Equality Advisory Council’s recommendations and the call for renewed commitments to the target of 0.7 per cent of Gross National Income for Official Development Assistance. The impact of COVID-19 on women and girls is particularly acute in less developed countries, where debt alleviation and financing initiatives will be particularly important alongside national budgets in order to support aspects like education for all, ending gender-based violence including online harassment, strengthened domestic and international social care infrastructure, efforts to ensure women’s equal access to capital and labour markets, and a gender-responsive approach to climate financing, investment, and policies ... We urge G7 leaders to continue championing gender equality and women’s empowerment, including by demonstrating the representation and leadership of women in delegations, and encouraging them to secure their commitments on gender equality through funding and concrete action.”
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- June 14, 1623 – The first English North American breach-of-promise lawsuit: Reverend Greville Pooley of the Virginia Colony files against Cecily Phippen Jordan Farrar. She was one of the few women in the colony to be receive a grant of 100 acres of land as an “ancient planter,” making her doubly desirable as a wife in a place where there were few available women. Her first husband died of malaria in 1620, and she re-married, to Samuel Jordan. When Jordan died, she was pregnant with his child, and inherited Jordan’s Journey, his 450 acre plantation. Reverend Pooley only waited four days after Samuel’s death before he proposed to her. He claimed that Cecily agreed, but on condition that the engagement be kept secret until after the baby is born. Pooley however began bragging that they were soon to be married, and Cecily became publicly engaged to William Farrar, disavowing Pooley’s claim. After two years of litigation, the case was resolved in Cecily’s favor in 1625. Pooley discharged her from all contracts and bound himself to a £500 bond stating that he would never have any claims, rights, or titles over her. Mrs. Jordan and Mr. Farrar were listed as co-heads of household at Jordan’s Journey until after the lawsuit was settled, and they were finally able to marry.
- June 14, 1811 – Harriet Beecher Stowe born, American author and abolitionist; Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a huge best-seller: 1.5 million copies are sold in its first year.
- June 14, 1839 – Alice Fisher born in England, pioneer in American nursing, whose tenure as a superintendent at the Philadelphia General Hospital dramatically improved the standard of care; she also started the hospital’s nursing school.
- June 14, 1877 – Ida Smedley Maclean born, English biochemist; first woman admitted to the London Chemical Society (1920). In 1906 Maclean became an assistant lecturer in the chemistry department of Manchester University, the department’s first woman staff member. However, she could not speak at the student Chemical Society since women could not be members, and the Society held its meetings in the Student Union building which excluded women. She taught at Manchester until 1910, as well as acting as a demonstrator in the women students’ laboratories and researching the optical properties of organic compounds. Maclean worked hard to improve the status of women in universities, and was among the founders of the British Federation of University Women in 1907. In 1910, supported by one of the first Beit fellowships, she began her work in biochemistry at the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine, receiving the American Association of University Women’s Ellen Richards Prize for her research. During World War I, she worked at the British Admiralty on gas warfare, and the large-scale production of acetone by fermentation. She was on the council of the London Chemical Society (1931-1934), and was president of the British Federation of University Women (1929-1935). Maclean was regarded as an authority on biochemistry, and her 1943 monograph The Metabolism of Fat was the first published of Methuen’s series Monographs on Biochemical Subjects.
- June 14, 1877 – Jane Bathori born, French mezzo-soprano, famous on the operatic stage and important in development of contemporary French music. In the early 1920s she greatly helped to popularize the new music of the day, especially by some of the members of Les Six, giving many first performances of their works. Also celebrated for her performance of Ravel’s song cycle Shéhérazade. During the WWII German occupation of France she lived in exile in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
- June 14, 1894 – Marie-Adélaïde born, Grand Duchess of Luxembourg; she became Grand Duchess regnant and ruler of Luxembourg at age 18, reigning from 1912 to 1919. She was Luxembourg’s first woman ruler since Duchess Maria Theresa (1740–1780), and the country’s first monarch to be born within its territory since Count John the Blind (1296-1346). She abdicated in favour of her sister Charlotte in 1919, and retired to an Italian monastery, where she died of influenza in 1924 at age 29.
- June 14, 1900 – Ruth Nanda Anshen born, American philosopher, editor, creator of the Science of Culture Series, and author; Anatomy of Evil, Biography of an Idea, and The Mystery of Consciousness: A Prescription for Human Survival; member of the International Philosophical Society.
- June 14, 1903 – Rose Rand born in Austria Hungary to a Jewish family, logician and philosopher; member of the Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers and scientists who met regularly at the University of Vienna (1924-1936); she received her PhD in 1938, but was blocked from finding employment, and emigrated to London as a Jew without nationality; she was admitted to the faculty of Moral Science at Cambridge, but lost her privileges in 1943; she struggled financially, then got a small research grant at Oxford, and also worked in practical engineering; moved to the U.S. in 1954, becoming a research associate at the University of Chicago and Notre Dame University; in 1959, she began getting grants and fellowships to work on translations; her research, detailed notes she took at the Vienna Circle meetings, and extensive correspondence with notable philosophers is now at the University of Pittsburgh.
- June 14, 1904 – Margaret Bourke-White born, American photojournalist, and war correspondent; she was the first woman photojournalist hired for LIFE magazine, and photographed the magazine’s first cover.
- June 14, 1907 – Landskvinnestemmerettsforeningen (National Association for Women’s Suffrage) wins a partial victory when Norway grants middle class women the right to vote in parliamentary elections. The association was founded in 1898, when Norwegian men achieved full suffrage, but women were left out. Universal suffrage was finally won in 1913.
- June 14, 1914 – Winifred Milius Lubell born, American artist, illustrator, writer, and activist for social justice. She created pen and ink portraits of victims of the Great Depression, before proceeding to examine the struggles of the working poor in the towns of the Eastern United States through woodcuts, as well as producing drawings from the sit-down strikes in Chicago.
- June 14, 1917 – Lise Nørgaard born, Danish journalist, television writer, and author, noted for her childhood memoir, Kun en pige (Only a girl), which became a best-seller. She is approaching her 105th birthday this month.
- June 14, 1923 – Judith Kerr born in Germany; her family fled to England in 1933; British children’s author and illustrator. She is known for the Mog series; The Tiger Who Came to Tea; and her semi-autobiographical book When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit.
- June 14, 1931 – Marla Gibbs born, African American comedian, singer, and television producer; best known for her role as Florence in the CBS sitcom, The Jeffersons (1975-1985). She was a co-producer and starred in the NBC show 227 (1985-1990), and sang the show’s theme song. Gibbs has won seven NAACP Image Awards. From 1981 to 1999, she owned a jazz club in South Central Los Angeles.
- June 14, 1936 – Irmelin Sandman Lilius born, Swedish-speaking Finnish writer, translator, and poet; her best-known work is a large chronicle of over a dozen books about a fictitious Finnish town she named Tulavall; awarded the 1976 Astrid Lindgren Prize.
- June 14, 1938 – Dorothy Pulis Lathrop, American author-illustrator, wins the first Caldecott Medal, for her illustrations for Animals of the Bible, A Picture Book, awarded by the children’s division of the American Library Association (ALA).
- June 14, 1944 – Laurie Colwin born, American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and food columnist for Gourmet magazine; best known for her novel Happy all the Time and her short story An Old-Fashioned Story. She died of an aortic aneurysm at age 48 in 1992.
- June 14, 1952 – Pat Summitt born, coach of the Tennessee’s Women’s Basketball team, which scored the most wins in NCAA history, breaking records for both men’s and women’s teams.
- June 14, 1953 – Janet Mackey born, New Zealand Labour Politician; Member of the New Zealand Parliament for East Coast (1999-2005); Member of Parliament for Mahia (1996-1999); Member of Parliament for Gisborne (1993-1996). Chair of the East Coast Regional Employment and Access Council (1984-1990). She was appointed as a justice of the peace in 1988, and became a marriage celebrant in 1989. Her daughter, Moana Mackey, was also a Labour Party Member of Parliament (2003-2014).
- June 14, 1955 – Kirron Kher born, Indian theatre, film and television actress, TV talk show host, social activist, and member of the Bharatiya Janata political party. Since May 2014, she has served as the representative for Chandigarh in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India’s Parliament. Kher has been active in Laadii, the Indian campaign against female infanticide, and the Roko cancer awareness campaign.
- June 14, 1957 – Mona Simpson born, American novelist; her first novel, Anywhere but Here, won a 1986 Whiting Award for Fiction. Simpson’s 1992 sequel, The Lost Father, won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. Her most recent book is Steps (2017).
- June 14, 1965 – Trina Shoemaker born, American record producer, sound engineer, and mixer who has worked with Sheryl Crow, Emmylou Harris, and Indigo Girls, among many others. She got her break in 1995 as the sound engineer on Sheryl Crow’s self-produced second album Sheryl Crow. In 1998 Shoemaker became the first woman to win the Grammy Award for Best Engineered Album for her work on Sheryl Crow’s The Globe Sessions.
- June 14, 1970 – Heather McDonald born, American comedian, writer, and actress; she started with The Groundlings improvisational theatre group, then began writing with Keenan Ivory Wayans, and doing stand-up comedy. She was a writer-performer on MTV’s Lyricist Lounge (2001-2002). McDonald has been a writer and made guest appearances on the Chelsea Lately TV show since its premier in 2007. In 2010, she published the memoir, You’ll Never Blue Ball in This Town Again: One Woman’s Painfully Funny Quest to Give It Up, and followed it with My Inappropriate Life (Some Stories Not Suitable for Nuns, Children, or Mature Adults) in 2013. In 2015, her stand-up special, Heather McDonald: I Don’t Mean to Brag, was released on Netflix.
- June 14, 1991 – Ten years after a vote which approved a new article in the Swiss Constitution (“Men and women have equal rights. The law shall ensure their equality, both in law and in practice, most particularly in the family, in education, and in the workplace. Men and women have the right to equal pay for work of equal value . . .”), 500,000 women from all across Switzerland came out for the Women’s Strike. They were calling attention to the lack of any new legislation to bring about real change, especially in the gender pay gap. It was also 20 years after Swiss women finally got the vote in federal elections. The strike was started by a group of women watchmakers in the Vaud and Jura regions, and organized by trade unionist Christiane Brunner. It became one of the biggest political demonstrations in Swiss history.
- June 14, 2017 – Embattled Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said he would take a leave of absence in the latest fallout from an investigation that concluded that the ride-hailing company needs to reform its corporate culture. Kalanick’s move was part of a list of actions Uber announced which were adopted by Uber’s board on the recommendation of the law firm of former Attorney General Eric Holder after a months-long investigation sparked by a sexual harassment complaint. Kalanick said he would use his leave of absence to work on his own performance and actions, and to figure out how to build a “world class leadership team” for Uber. On the same day, Uber board member Arianna Huffington said that once there is one woman on a board, more women tend to join. Board member David Bonderman, of the private equity firm TPG, responded that including women on boards results in “more talking.” Bonderman resigned after he was called out for his sexist remark. Huffington resigned from the board in 2019 to focus on other projects.
- June 14, 2017 – On the day before she died, struggling artist Khadija Saye, age 24, was contacted by Andrew Nairne, influential director of the Kettle’s Yard gallery, who had seen her work in a showcase exhibit of emerging artists at the Venice Biennale, and wanted to meet with her. For years, she had been earning a living as a care worker, and sharing a 20th floor flat with her mother, an immigrant from Gambia, in Grefell Tower, a council block building. But just as her dream of becoming a full-time artist was about to come true, a fire was started by a malfunctioning freezer on the fourth floor of her building, which spread rapidly to the building’s exterior cladding, and the air gap between the cladding and the insulation created a chimney effect. It took 250 London firefighters 60 hours to extinguish the blaze. Saye was one of the 72 people who died in the fire. It was the worst residential fire in the UK since the Second World War. In the subsequent investigation, the building’s exterior cladding was found not to comply with regulations, and was the main reason the fire spread with such devastating speed. Nairne said of Khadija Saye: “That she had created such a remarkable, powerful, original series of works was quite extraordinary. It’s an absolute tragedy – this was such a confident first body of work, but there was so much more to come. She had a remarkable future ahead of her.”
- June 14, 2019 – Echoing the 1991 Women’s Strike, tens of thousands of Swiss women walked out of their jobs or took part in work stoppages, part of a nation-wide strike in protest of the inadequate progress made in ending the gender pay gap and women’s inequality. In Basel, a crowd of 50,000 women, many wearing the movement’s signature purple, carried signs with demands for equal pay, denunciation of feminicide, sharing of domestic and care work, non-sexist education in schools, and fulfilled sexuality. They gathered in front of a display of posters showing heroic women of Basel who have led protests since the Middle Ages. There were large street demonstrations in every Swiss city which were cheerful, colourful, and noisy.
- June 14, 2020 – Voter registration in the U.S. was way up in January and February of 2020, but plummeted when the Covid-19 pandemic hit hard in March. Closed schools and canceled public festivals hindered in-person voter registration drives run by the League of Women Voters and other groups. Jeanette Senecal, a senior director for the League of Women Voters, said, “We had planned to go to 850 high schools leading up to graduation, but as schools closed, that work was clearly disrupted.” In a normal election year, the majority of voters registered are 18-year-olds registering for the first time, or people in their 20s, who are more likely to move than older voters, and need to register at a new address. Registrations were still much lower than usual in April, May, and the first half of June, in some states the drop was 38% or higher over registration by June in 2016, causing concerns that many younger people would not be able to vote in November. But by October 2020, 40 U.S. states and the District of Columbia had passed legislation allowing online voter registration. Black activists Stacey Abrams of the New Georgia Project, and Brittany Packnett Cunningham of Campaign Zero led teams that registered thousands of African American voters. And despite all the challenges in registering voters, and challenges for eligible voters in getting their votes in, 17 million more people voted in the 2020 election than in 2016 election – 67% of all citizens age 18 and older.
- June 14, 2021 – The organization RepresentWomen issued a press release hailing the reintroduction of the Fair Representation Act (FRA) by Representative Don Beyer of Virginia. The FRA is an election reform bill to change how U.S. Representatives are elected. This bill supports the replacement of current single-member Congressional districts with Multi-Member Districts and the adoption of Ranked-Choice Voting to elect House Members, proven strategies shown to increase women’s representation in politics. According to Representative Byer, “… bad voting incentives have caused a terrible and growing threat to our democracy, and we need bold electoral changes to help solve that problem and reform our system before it is too late. The Fair Representation Act would help put the country back on the right track, strengthen our electoral system, restore public trust, ensure every voter has their voice represented in Congress, and incentivize the election of Members who prioritize practical legislative results and solutions to the problems which beset our country.” RepresentWomen’s voter reform studies show that the current single-member and winner-take-all electoral system inherently favors incumbents and reinforces our elected bodies’ white, cis, male status quo; primarily by hurting challenger candidates who are more likely to be younger, more diverse, and women. Our current electoral system also encourages expensive and negative campaigns. According to Represent Women’s Election 2020 Counting: “During the 2020 Congressional elections, incumbents had a success rate of 96%, compared to challengers who had a success rate of 3.5%. Candidates running in open seats had a success rate of 42%.”
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- June 15, 1648 – Margaret Jones is hanged in Boston, becoming the first person executed for witchcraft in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
- June 15, 1860 – Florence Nightingale opens the first school for nurses at the St. Thomas hospital in London.
- June 15, 1878 – Margaret Abbott born, American golfer and Olympic winner, first American woman to win an event in the Olympics, in possibly the weirdest Olympics story ever. The 1900 Paris Games were held at the same time as the Paris Exhibition, and were a poorly organized and little-publicized sideshow to the Exhibition. Many of the participants, including Abbott, did not even know they were competing in Olympic events. It was the first Olympics where women were allowed to participate, and only 22 women competed, compared to 975 men. The games stretched out over six months, and no one got a medal – it was the only Olympics where various objects, like porcelain bowls, were given as prizes instead of medals. Margaret Abbott and her mother Mary were living in Paris between 1899 and 1902, and Margaret had won several local amateur golfing events back home in Illinois, but wasn’t one of the official U.S. Olympians – she was just there in Paris and knew how to play. All the women golfers wore long skirts and fashionable hats – some even showed up wearing high heels and tight skirts. It was just a nine-hole event, and Margaret won with a score of 47; her mother also played, and came in seventh with a score of 65. This was the only time in Olympic history that a mother and daughter competed in the same sport in the same event at the same Olympics. It wasn’t until after Margaret Abbott’s death, when historical researchers found evidence the women’s golf event was actually part of the 1900 Olympics, that her win became an official Olympic record, so she never knew she was an Olympian. Women’s golf did not return to the Olympics until the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro.
- June 15, 1887 – Malvina Hoffman born, American artist and author; her monumental bronze sculpture series, “The Races of Mankind,” is commissioned in 1930 by Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History.
- June 15, 1901 – Ruth Cowan born, journalist, one of the first women military correspondents, president of the Women’s National Press Club.
- June 15, 1908 – Margaret Harris Amsler born, American Democratic politician and law professor; in 1955, she became the third woman full law professor at a U.S. law school, after Harriet Spiller Daggett in 1931, and Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong in 1935. When she graduated from law school in 1937, she was the only woman in her class, and valedictorian. She was elected to the Texas legislature in 1938, representing McLennan County (1939-1941), one of two women in the Texas house that term. She was not reelected. Amsler taught law at Baylor University from 1941 to 1944, when the law school closed until 1946 because of WWII. When it reopened, she was acting Dean. She taught business law, becoming an associate professor in 1947 and a full professor in 1955. She received her JD in 1969. She was part of the commission that drafted the Texas Business Corporation Act of 1955, and the commission that drafted the Texas laws for non-profit corporations of 1959. Amsler also drafted the Texas Married Women's Act of 1963, which gave married woman the right to enter into a contract, sue, or sell property, without her husband's permission. She retired from teaching in 1972, but continued to practise law until 1990. She died at age 93 in 2002
- June 15, 1914 – Hilda Terry born, American cartoonist; comic strip Teena; the first woman to join the National Cartoonists Society.
- June 15, 1915 – Nini Theilade born, Danish ballet dancer and choreographer, leading dancer with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo (1938-1940) and choreographed several works for the Royal Danish Ballet. She went to Brazil during WWII, where she taught ballet, and then returned to Copenhagen in the 1950s, and started a ballet school. She lived to age 102.
- June 15, 1916 – Olga Erteszek born, Polish immigrant, established the Olga Company in 1960, maker of women’s undergarments, one of the first companies to offer employee profit sharing.
- June 15, 1920 – Amy Clampitt born, American poet and author; she worked as a secretary at the Oxford University Press, a reference librarian at the Audubon Society, and a freelance editor, before taking up writing poetry again in her 40s, which she had first written in college. Her debut full-length poetry collection, The Kingfisher, wasn't published until 1983, when she was 63 years old. Clampitt published five more books of poetry, including What the Light Was Like (1985); Archaic Figure (1987); Westward (1990); and her last book, A Silence Opens, was published in 1994, the year she died of cancer.
- June 15, 1921 – Bessie Coleman receives her pilot’s license after graduating from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale. She is the first African American woman to earn a pilot’s license and the first American of any race or gender to earn an international license.
- June 15, 1924 – Hédi Fried born in Romania, Swedish psychologist and author; a Holocaust survivor of both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belson, she arrived in Sweden in July 1945. Fried has received many honors, including the Swedish Illis Quorum medal, the 1998 Natur & Kulturs Kulturpris for her literary work, and the Order of the Star of Romania in 2016.
- June 15, 1926 – Carol Fox born, American impresario, co-founder and director of the Chicago Lyric Opera (1954-1980).
- June 15, 1938 – Jeanette W. Hyde born, American diplomat; President Bill Clinton appointed her as U.S. Ambassador to Barbados/Dominica/St. Lucia (1994-1998) and as Ambassador to Antigua/Grenada/St. Vincent and St. Christopher-Nevis-Anguilla (1995-1998). In 1996, the U.S. Coast Guard presented her with its highest civilian award for Public Service for treaty work on drug trafficking, and in 1997 the U.S. Department of Defense, the FBI and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency presented her with Civilian Service awards. She is a member of the Council of American Ambassadors.
- June 14, 1943 – Xaviera Hollander born as Xaviera de Vries in the Dutch East Indies; call girl, madam, memoirist, and B&B owner-operator; known for her best-selling memoir The Happy Hooker: My Own Story. Since 2005, she has run a bed-and-breakfast in Amsterdam, called Xaviera’s Happy House.
- June 15, 1945 – Miriam Defensor Santiago born, Filipino judge and politician; as a senator of the Philippines, in 1995 she authored a record number of bills and laws; in 2012, she became the first Filipina and first Asian from a developing country to be elected as a judge of the International Criminal Court at the Hague, but was forced to resign when she was diagnosed with lung cancer; in 2016, she joined the Advisory Council of the International Development Law Organization (IDLO), an intergovernmental body that promotes the rule of law.
- June 15, 1947 – Dava Sobel born, American author of popular books on science and science history. Noted for Longitude; Galileo’s Daughter; and The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars.
- June 15, 1950 – Juliana Azumah-Mensah born, Ghanaian politician and nurse-midwife; Member of the Ghana Parliament since 2005; Minister for Women and Children’s Affairs (2010-2012); Minister for Tourism (2009-2010).
- June 15, 1951 – Jane Amsterdam born, American magazine and newspaper editor. She was a section editor for the Washington Post (1979-1983), then became editor of Manhattan Inc. magazine (1984-1987), which won the 1985 National Magazine Award for General Excellence. In 1988, she became a senior editor at Alfred A. Knopf, then left to be an editor at the New York Post, but was forced out when her shift in emphasis from tabloid sensationalism to investigative journalism failed to sell more newspapers.
- June 15, 1953 – Ana Castillo born, Mexican-American author, poet, editor, playwright, and scholar, recipient of an American Book Award and a Carl Sandburg Award, and the first Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Endowed Chair at DePaul University.
- June 15, 1963 – Helen Hunt born, American actress, director, and screenwriter; best known for the sitcom Mad About You, for which she won four Emmys, and her performance in the film As Good as It Gets, which earned her an Oscar for Best Actress. She made her directorial debut with Then She Found Me (2007) and also starred and co-authored the screenplay. She wrote the screenplay and directed Ride in 2014, as well as directing numerous episodes of several television series.
- June 15, 1970 – Leah Remini born, American actress, producer, and anti-Scientology activist; starred as Carrie Heffernan on the TV comedy The King of Queens (1998-2007); co-produced and hosted the documentary series Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath (2016-2019), which won two Primetime Emmys for Outstanding Hosted Nonfictions Series or Special. She was raised as a member of the Church of Scientology from the age of eight, but left the organization in 2013. In 2015, she published her memoir, Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology. She is the head of her production company, No, Seriously Productions. Since July 2020, Remini has co-hosted Scientology: Fair Game with Mike Rinder.
- June 15, 1985 – Ashley Nicole Black born, African American comedian, writer, and actress. She began in comedy at Second City; writer and correspondent for Full Frontal with Samantha Bee (2016-2019). She won an Emmy for Outstanding Writing For A Variety Special in 2017 for her work as one of the writers on ‘Not the White House Correspondents’ Dinner’ special for Full Frontal with Samantha Bee.
- June 15, 1987 – CompuServe released the Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) to provide a color image format for their file downloading areas. The format supports animations and allows a separate palette of up to 256 colors for each frame. Computer scientist and entreprenuer Lisa Gelobter was on the GIFs project team, and worked on developing the animation. She went on to work on other pioneering internet technologies, including Shockwave, a multimedia platform for video games, and the streaming service Hulu. In 2017, Gelobter founded tEQuitable, an independent, confidential platform which uses technology to make workplaces more equitable, addressing issues of bias, harassment, and discrimination. This top entreprenuer raised more than $2 million for the tEQuitable platform.
- June 15, 2019 – Zuzana Čaputová took office as the first woman president of Slovakia. At age 45, she was also the youngest person to be elected to the office. She is a Progressive Slovakia party co-founding member, a lawyer, and an environmental activist. Čaputová campaigned on making the police force an independent institution without political influence, headed by an impartial professional with proven service, and transforming the prosecutor’s office into a publicly managed institution.
- June 15, 2020 – The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that gay and transgender people are protected from workplace discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which bars employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of sex, race, color, national origin, or religion. The decision marked a major victory for LGBTQ rights. The Trump administration and employers accused of discrimination argued that Congress never intended Title VII to apply to gay and transgender people. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion that an employer who fires someone for being gay or transgender "fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids."
- June 15, 2021 – Hungary’s parliament passed a law banning gay people from being featured in school educational materials or TV shows for under-18s, as Viktor Orbán’s ruling party intensified its campaign against LGBTQ rights. The national assembly passed the legislation by 157 votes to one, after MPs in the ruling Fidesz party ignored a last-minute plea by one of Europe’s leading human rights officials to abandon the plan as “an affront against the rights and identities of LGBT+ persons.” The outcome of the vote was never in doubt, as Fidesz has a healthy majority and the plans were supported by the far-right Jobbik party. The measures have been likened by critics to Russia’s 2013 law against “gay propaganda” that independent monitors say has increased social hostility and fuelled vigilante attacks against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in the EU country’s eastern neighbour. “There are contents which children under a certain age can misunderstand and which may have a detrimental effect on their development at the given age, or which children simply cannot process, and which could therefore confuse their developing moral values or their image of themselves or the world,” said a Hungarian government spokesperson. The law also means only individuals and organisations listed in an official register can carry out sex education classes in schools, a measure targeting “organisations with dubious professional background … often established for the representation of specific sexual orientations”, the government spokesperson said. Companies and large organisations will also be banned from running ads in solidarity with gay people, if they are deemed to target under-18s. In 2019, a Coca-Cola ad campaign featuring smiling gay couples and anti-discrimination slogans prompted some prominent Fidesz members to call for a boycott of the company’s products. Amnesty International’s Hungarian chapter, which has spearheaded protests against the plans, described the passing of the law as a “dark day for LGBTI rights and for Hungary ... Tagging these amendments to a bill that seeks to crack down on child abuse appears to be a deliberate attempt by the Hungarian government to conflate paedophilia with LGBT+ people.” Anna Donáth, a member of the Hungarian opposition, who sits in the liberal group in the European parliament, called on EU authorities to take immediate action, “The law is incompatible with the fundamental values of European democratic societies as well as the values of the Hungarian citizens and is only the latest of many shameful attacks on LGBTQ+ rights by Viktor Orbán’s government.”
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Necking Giraffes
Among giraffes, there's more same-sex than opposite-sex activity. In fact, studies say gay sex accounts for more than 90% of all observed sexual activity in giraffes. And they don't just get straight to business. Male giraffes know how to flirt, first necking with each other — that is, gently rubbing their necks along the other's body. This foreplay can last for up to an hour.
Studies suggest that about 1,500 animal species are known to practice same-sex coupling — from insects to fish, birds, and mammals.