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 16 through June 23.
The next WOW2 edition will post
on Saturday, June 25, 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
“It takes no compromise to give people their rights ... it takes no money to respect the individual. It takes no political deal to give people freedom. It takes no survey to remove repression.” – Harvey Milk
THIS WEEK IN THE WAR ON WOMEN
will post shortly, so be sure to go there next, and
catch up on the latest dispatches from the frontlines.
Many, many thanks to libera nos, intrepid Assistant Editor of WOW2. Any remaining mistakes are either mine, or uncaught computer glitches in transferring the data from his emails to DK5. And much thanks to wow2lib, WOW2’s Librarian Emeritus.
Trailblazing Women and Events in Our History
Note: All images and audios are below the person or event to which they refer.
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- June 16, 1644 – Princess Henrietta of England born, Duchess of Orléans, and sister of King Charles II. Instrumental in negotiating the 1670 Secret Treaty of Dover between England and France, a pact in which Charles promised to support French policy in Europe in return for a French subsidy which would free him from financial dependence on Parliament, and the support of 6,000 French troops, if needed, should he declare himself a Roman Catholic. A very dangerous intrigue for an English monarch and his sister, especially for the children of the executed Charles I. The formal and public Treaty of Dover, without these incendiary details, was concluded later that year. Shortly after returning to France from the negotiations, Henrietta developed severe gastric distress, and died. It was rumoured she was poisoned, but the autopsy report gave the cause of death as “from cholera morbus caused by heated bile” – probably what is now called gastroenteritis.
- June 16, 1738 – Mary Katherine Goddard born, American publisher, printer, and bookseller. Her father was postmaster for New London, Connecticut. Her brother William founded a patriot newspaper, the Maryland Journal, in Baltimore. In 1774, she took over from him as publisher and printer of the Maryland Journal while he traveled to promote his Constitutional Post. In 1775, she became the first American woman postmaster (1775-1789), in Baltimore. In 1777, she was commissioned by Congress as the second printer of the Declaration of Independence, but her copies were the first to list all of the signer’s names (now called the Goddard Broadside). At the time, this would likely have been construed as treason to the British Crown. Ironically, in 1789, under the new U.S. Constitution, the Postmaster General removed her from her postmaster position, using her gender as an excuse to replace her with one of his cronies. That year, she opened a bookstore in Baltimore, which was almost certainly the first run by a woman proprietor in the U.S.
- June 16, 1829 – Bessie Rayner Parkes born, English poet, essayist, journalist, prominent feminist, and women’s rights advocate in Victorian England. She and her friend Barbara Smith Bodichon campaigned for the Married Women’s Property Act 1870, which made married women the legal owners of the money they earned, and gave them the right to inherit property. Parker was the principal editor of the first English feminist periodical, the English Woman’s Journal, published monthly (1858-1964). Its closure was due to financial difficulties and conflicts between sponsors and chief contributors, but it led to many other women’s ventures, including the Society for the Promotion of the Employment of Women; the Law-Copying Office; the Langham Place Group, where women gathered informally to talk; and the Victoria Printing Press (entirely staffed by women), which was started by Parkes in 1860. In 1866, Parkes and Bodichon formed the first Women’s Suffrage Committee. A petition they created was presented to the House of Commons, and they launched a campaign for voting rights. She wrote and published 14 books: poetry, essays, biography, memoirs, travelogues, and works for children, as well as a very effective pamphlet on women’s rights, and dozens of articles. She died in 1925, at the age of 95.
- June 16, 1892 – Jennie Grossinger born in Galicia, came to America at age eight. A highly successful hotelier and philanthropist, she ran the family’s elegant resort, Grossinger’s, in the Catskills, the first resort to use artificial snow (1952). She also successfully circumvented the anti-Jewish restrictive covenants of the time.
- June 16, 1895 – India Edwards born, Democratic Party political activist; Vice Chairman of the Democratic National Committee (1950-1956).
- June 16, 1899 – Helen Traubel born, American dramatic soprano, known for her Wagnerian roles, especially Brünnhilde and Isolde.
- June 16, 1902 – Barbara McClintock born, American cytogeneticist and major figure in the history of genetics; noted for her development of maize cytogenetics in the 1940s and 1950s, and her theory that genes are transposable on and between chromosomes, which was confirmed by other scientists by the early 1980s. Recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1983, the first woman to win an unshared Nobel Prize.
- June 16, 1915 – The British Women’s Institute (The WI) founded, the largest women’s volunteer organization in the UK.
- June 16, 1915 – Lucy Davidowicz born Lucy Schildkret, American historian, prominent scholar of Jewish history and the Holocaust. U.S.-born daughter of Polish immigrants, she moved to Poland in 1938 to work at the Yiddish Scientific Institute, but returned to the U.S. just weeks before WWII broke out in Europe; in 1946, she returned to Europe as an aid worker for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee among Jewish survivors in Displaced Persons camps.
- June 16, 1915 – Marga Faulstich born, German glass chemist; worked for Schott AG for 44 years, and was Schott’s first woman executive. Faulstich worked on more than 300 types of optical glass, especially for microscopes and binoculars. There are 40 patents registered in her name.
- June 16, 1917 – Katharine “Kay” Graham born, American publisher; first woman publisher of a major American newspaper as the leader of her family’s newspaper, The Washington Post, after her husband’s suicide in 1963, formally assuming the title of president by 1967, and publisher (1969-1979), then chair of the board (1973-1991); recipient of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for her memoir Personal History.
- June 16, 1920 – Isabelle Holland born, Swiss-American author, known for books both for adults and for children; her novels Bump in the Night and The Man Without a Face were made into movies.
- June 16, 1934 – Dame Eileen Atkins born, English actress and screenwriter; three-time Olivier Award winner in 1988 for Best Supporting Performance (for multiple roles), and for Best Actress in 1999 for The Unexpected Man, and for Best Actress in 2004 for Honour. Atkins joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1957, and has appeared regularly on stage in London, on Broadway, and at the Edinburgh Festival. Co-creator with Jean March of the TV dramas Upstairs, Downstairs and The House of Elliot. She also wrote the screenplay in 1997 for Mrs. Dalloway, starring Vanessa Redgrave. Atkins was created a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1990, and a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2001.
- June 16, 1938 – Joyce Carol Oates born, American author of over 40 novels, as well as plays, novellas, short stories, and poetry; 1969 National Book Award for them, and a 2010 National Humanities Medal.
- June 16, 1941 – Rosalind Baker born, Australian founder of Entre Nous, a relationship and education consultancy, and author of self-help relationship books, including Dial a Woman, and Dial a Man. She was a columnist and Women’s Editor of the Toorak Times, in Melbourne.
- June 16, 1945 – Lucienne Robillard born, Canadian Liberal politician and social worker; President of Quebec’s Liberal Party (since 2010); Liberal Party deputy leader in the House of Commons (2006-2008); member of the Canadian Parliament (1995-2008); Minister of Citizenship and Immigration (1996-1999); Minister of Labour (1995-1996); member of the National Assembly of Quebec (1989-1994). Prior to her political career, she was a public trustee for Quebec’s Public Guardian and Trustee Office (1986-1989), and a social worker for Quebec’s Health and Social Services Network (1967-1978).
- June 16, 1946 – Karen Dunnell born, British medical sociologist and civil servant; National Statistician and CEO of the UK Office for National Statistics (2005-2009); also inaugural CEO of the UK Statistics Authority in 2008; Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society; appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the Bath in the 2009 Queen’s Birthday Honours.
- June 16, 1946 – Jodi Rell born, Republican politician; governor of Connecticut (2004-2004), the state’s second woman governor, after Ella Grasso. She was pro-choice and supported embryonic stem-cell research. Rell also supported a lawsuit filed by Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal against the U.S. Department of Education over the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which requires states to pay for standardized testing every school year, instead of every other year, but proposed increasing the budget for public schools in other areas as more effective.
- June 16, 1947 – Ellen Bass born, American poet and co-author of The Courage to Heal. Co-founder of the Survivors Healing Center in Santa Cruz, California, a non-profit organization offering services to survivors of child sexual abuse. Her poetry collections include Mules of Love; Like a Beggar; and Indigo.
- June 16, 1955 – Grete Faremo born, Norwegian politician, civil servant, and lawyer; current Executive Director of the UN Office for Project Services since 2014; Norwegian Minister of Justice (1992-1996 and 2011-2013) where she oversaw a major overhaul of the nation’s emergency system and other reforms; Minister of Defence (2009-2011); Minister of International Aid (1990-1992); Minister of Petroleum and Energy (1996); Member of the Norwegian Parliament (1993-1997).
- June 16, 1957 – Leeona Dorrian born, Lady Dorrian since 2005; incumbent Lord Justice Clerk, beginning in 2016, the second most senior judicial post in Scotland, and the first woman to serve in this position; Senator of the College of Justice (2005-2012), promoted to the Inner House, the senior section of the Court of Session of the Supreme Civil Court of Scotland, in 2012.
- June 16, 1963 – Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova becomes the first woman in space when she pilots Vostok 6.
- June 16, 1969 – Sharmishta Chakrabarti born in London to Bengali parents; feminist, advocate for civil liberties and human rights; created a life peer as Baroness Chakrabarti in 2016; British Labour Party politician; Lord Temporal (non-clergy) Member of the House of Lords since 2016; in 2018, it was announced that Chakrabarti would be sworn as a member of the Privy Council of the United Kingdom.
- June 16, 1972 – Ann Shoket born, American magazine editor and writer; Editor-in-Chief of Seventeen magazine (2007-2014); author of The Big Life (2017), and founder of New Power Media, a media and events platform.
- June 16, 1987 – Ali Stroker born, American actress, and singer; she was in a car accident at age two which left her paralyzed from the waist down. In 2015, she made history by becoming the first actor who uses a wheelchair to appear on a Broadway stage. She played the role of Anna in Deaf West Theatre's revival of Spring Awakening. In 2019, she played Ado Annie in a revival of Oklahoma! at Broadway's Circle in the Square Theatre, and won a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical, the first person with a disability to be nominated for and win that award.
- June 16, 2004 – Martha Stewart, American businesswoman and television host of Martha Stewart Living, sentenced to five months in prison and five months of home confinement by a federal judge for lying about a stock sale.
- June 16, 2012 – Pilot and astronaut Liu Yang becomes the first Chinese woman in space as a crew member of the Shenzhou 9 mission.
- June 16, 2016 – Jo Cox, Labour Member of British Parliament, known for her work on women's issues, support for refugees, and opposition to Brexit, was assassinated outside a meeting with constituents by a 52-year-old man with a history of psychiatric problems and links to a neo-Nazi group, who shouted “Britain first!” as he shot her three times, then stabbed her repeatedly. Bernard Kenney, a 77-year-old retired miner, was stabbed in the stomach while trying to fend off her attacker. Kenney survived, and was honored with the George Medal, but died two years later. Her killer was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment with a whole life order (no possibility of parole).
- June 16, 2019 – In the United Kingdom, the Guardian newspaper reports that a bizarre scheme put forward by Nottinghamshire Police to decrease the number of domestic violence deaths has been met with both ridicule and outrage. The police have offered to provide victims of domestic abuse with blunt-ended knives for their kitchens, to make it more difficult for their violent partners to effectively stab them to death. Nottingham police and crime commissioner, Paddy Tipping, touted the blunt knives project: “It is an excellent initiative. Some research shows that women are attacked around 19 times before they leave their home.” But Jessica Eaton, founder of Victim Focus, retorted, “I work with women who have been stabbed with forks ... You could be attacked with anything.” On average, two women a week are killed by a current or former partner in England and Wales alone. Women have been murdered or severely injured by intimate partners with fists, stones, multi-tools, axes, scissors, cricket bats, boiling water, electrical cords – and knives used to cut across the throat of the victim rather than stabbing her. Nottinghamshire Police works with Women’s Aid to help domestic abuse victims but the charity did not wish to comment when contacted.
- June 16, 2020 – Reni Eddo-Lodge became the first black author to reach the overall #1 spot in the UK official book charts since the Nielsen Bookscan began keeping records of book sales in 2001. Her book, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, evolved out of Eddo-Lodge’s popular blog, and had reached #1 on the non-fiction paperback charts the previous week. She tweeted: “Feels absolutely wild to have broken this record. My work stands on the shoulders of so many black British literary giants - Bernadine Evaristo, Benjamin Zephaniah, Zadie Smith, Andrea Levy, Stella Dadzie, Stuart Hall, Linton K Johnson, Jackie Kay, Gary Younge - to name a few.” Michelle Obama’s memoir, Becoming, had reached #1 on the non-fiction charts in 2018. In the same week as Eddo-Lodge’s break-through to the pinnacle of the best-seller charts, publisher Sharmaine Lovegrove, journalist Afua Hirsch, and author Nels Abbey formed the Black Writers’ Guild, calling for sweeping change across the publishing industry to address deep-rooted racial inequalities.
- June 16, 2021 – A Human Rights Watch (HRW) report on sex crime prosecutions involving illegal filming and online sexual abuse in South Korea found an eleven-fold increase in digital sex crimes between 2008 and 2017. HRW said in its report, My Life is Not Your Porn: Digital Sex Crimes in South Korea, that molka – use of hidden cameras to film or share explicit images of women without their consent – caused victims to consider quitting their jobs, leaving the country, or even to consider suicide. HRW stated that the trauma was made worse by encounters with unsympathetic police and courts, and called on the government to introduce harsher penalties and educate men and boys about the dangers of consuming abusive images online. “Digital sex crimes have become so common, and so feared, in South Korea that they are affecting the quality of life of all women and girls,” said Heather Barr, HRW’s Women’s Rights Division associate director.
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- June 17, 1610 – Birgitte Thott born, Danish scholar, writer, and early feminist who was an advocate for educating women; fluent and literate in her main area of study, Latin, and several other languages, including English, French, German, and Hebrew; notable for her translations of published works into Danish, especially her 1,000-page translation of the Philologus of Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca, which was the first in Danish, and added new words to the Danish language.
- June 17, 1631 – Mumtaz Mahal dies giving birth to her 14th child, daughter Gauhar Ara Begum. Her husband, Mughal emperor Shah Jahan I, would spend the next 17 years building the mausoleum for his beloved wife, the Taj Mahal.
- June 17, 1818 – Sophie of Württemberg born, Queen Consort of the Netherlands. Her arranged marriage to William, Prince of Orange, was an unhappy one. She was his intellectual superior, and he continued his frequent affairs without discretion. Though both wanted a divorce, their position made it impossible, so when he succeeded to the throne as King William III after the death of his father in 1849, a separation was arranged. He had full custody of their eldest son as heir to the throne, and she was given full custody of their younger son. They lived in separate palaces. She traveled frequently, often to visit her family. She continued to carry out her public duties as queen, but devoted herself to correspondence with many of the notable intellectuals of her day, and support of several charities, especially for the protection of animals, the construction of public parks, and the education of the mentally challenged. She also supported the women’s rights movement from its beginning in the Netherlands, and was the protector of Arbeld Adelt (“labour is ennobling”), the first nationwide Dutch women’s organization, which was founded in 1871 to advocate for more access to education and professions in which women could support themselves. Sophie was dubbed “la reine rouge” (the red queen) because of her left-leaning political opinions, interest in the sciences, non-dogmatic views on religion, support for progressive development, and her disdain for etiquette. She died at age 58, and was buried at her request in her wedding dress, because she declared her life had ended on the day she was married.
- June 17, 1865 – Susan La Flesche Picotte born, of the Omaha tribe, first Native American physician (1889), fought tuberculosis and alcoholism on the reservation, campaigned for land rights and a reservation hospital (1913), later named for her.
- June 17, 1869 – Flora Finch born in England, American comedian, stage and film actress, producer, and film company owner. Her parents were music hall performers who moved to the U.S. when Flora was a child. She worked in theatre and on the vaudeville circuit until she was in her 30s. Finch starred in over 300 silent films, with co-stars like Fatty Arbuckle, Mack Sennett, and Charlie Chaplin. In 1910, she went to work at Vitagraph Studios, and made 150 very popular short comedies (dubbed “Bunny finches”) with actor John Bunny up until 1915, when Bunny died. Finch’s solo shorts were less popular. She founded her own production company in 1916, but never regained her popularity. She appeared in silent films like Orphans of the Storm (1921 – as a “starving peasant”) and The Cat and the Canary in the supporting role of “Aunt Susan” in 1927. With the coming of sound her roles became even smaller, but she was in the 1934 production of The Scarlet Letter. Her part, a “window tapper” was uncredited in her last film, 1939’s The Women. Flora Finch died of blood poisoning from an infection after she got a cut on her arm in 1940.
- June 17, 1873 – The first day of the trial of Susan B. Anthony, accused of voting illegally in the presidential election on November 5, 1872, in Rochester, New York.
- June 17, 1900 – Evelyn Graham Irons born, Scottish journalist who wrote mostly for the Evening Standard; one of the first WWII newspaper women to arrive in Paris after it was liberated, and the first woman journalist to reach Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest after its capture. She was the first woman war correspondent to be decorated with the French Croix de Guerre, and also the first woman to receive the British Royal Humane Society’s Stanhope Medal in 1935 for courageously rescuing a woman from drowning at Tresaith Beach, Cardiganshire. In 1952, she was sent to cover the U.S. presidential election, and stayed on in New York. In 1954, she broke the news embargo on the overthrow of Guatemalan President Jaobo Arbenz Guzmán, by hiring a mule to ride to Chiquimula, while other journalists, forbidden to cross the border, waited in a bar in Honduras, so she was the first reporter to reach the Provisional Government’s headquarters. An editor for a rival paper sent his reporter a telegram ordering him to “offget arse onget donkey.”
- June 17, 1903 – Ruth Graves Wakefield born, inventor of the Toll House Cookie, the first chocolate chip cookie, at the Toll House Inn near Whitman MA in the 1930s.
- June 17, 1908 – Trude Weiss-Rosmarin born in Germany; American editor and author; co-founder of the School of the Jewish Woman (1933); publisher and founder in 1939 of the Jewish Spectator, a quarterly magazine, which she continued to edit for 50 years.
- June 17, 1919 – Galina Ustvolskaya born, Russian composer of orchestral and chamber music, noted for piano sonatas; her style evolved over time toward modernism. She was well-known in musical circles in Leningrad and Moscow, but her music didn’t become known outside of Russia until her music was performed in several concerts of the 1989 Holland Festival. She died at age 87 in 2006.
- June 17-18, 1921 – Margaret Ray Ringenberg born, American pilot and a WASP during WWII, ferrying aircraft from factories to airbases within the continental U.S. from 1943 until the WASP program was disbanded at the end of 1944. She went home to Fort Wayne, Indiana, became a flight instructor, and married Morris Ringenberg. In the 1950s, she was racing planes in the Powder Puff Derby, the Air Race Classic, the Grand Prix, and the Denver Mile High. In 1988, at age 68, she won the Air Race Classic. In 1994, she completed the Round-the-World Air Race at age 72, with two co-pilots. In 1998, she published her autobiography Girls Can't Be Pilots. In 1999, she was awarded the NAA Elder Statesman in Aviation Award. In 2001, she flew in a race from London, England to Sydney, Australia at the age of 79. In 2008, she completed the 2,312-mile Air Race Classic race at the age of 87. About a month after completing the Air Race Classic, she passed away in her sleep. At the time of her death, she had logged over 40,000 hours in the air.
- June 17-18, 1928 – Amelia Earhart embarks on the first trans-Atlantic flight by a woman – as a passenger. The plane was piloted by Wilmer Stultz with Lou Gordon as mechanic. "The idea of just going as 'extra weight' did not appeal to me at all," she said, but she accepted the offer, which opened the way to sponsorship for Earhart to make flights as a pilot.
- June 17, 1943 – Chantal Mouffe born, Belgian political theorist, best known for co-authoring Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a radical democratic politics with Ernesto Laclau, a post-Marxist redefining of Leftist politics, and her controversial book, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically.
- June 17, 1948 – Jacqueline Jones born, American social historian; author of works on race, slavery, class, and economics (including feminist economics); she is a MacArthur Fellow and won the 1986 Bancroft Prize for her second book, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present, which combines traditional historical sources with feminist scholarship; followed by The Dispossessed, America’s Underclasses from the Civil War to the Present, which continues her themes.
- June 17, 1951 – Starhawk born Miriam Simos, American writer, activist, and theorist of feminist neopaganism and ecofeminism; her book The Spiral Dance was an inspiration of the Goddess movement.
- June 17, 1952 – Estelle Morris born, Baroness Morris of Yardley; British Labour Party politician and former inner-city Humanities teacher; Warwick District Council member (1979-1991); Member of Parliament for Birmingham Yardley (1992-2005); Minister of State for Schools (1998-2001); Secretary of State for Education and Skills (2001-2002); Minister of State for the Arts (2003-2005); after stepping down from government, she became President of the National Children’s Bureau in 2005.
- June 17, 1959 – Carol E. Anderson born, African American historian, academic and author; professor of African American Studies at Emory University; noted for Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941–1960, and White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, which won the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.
- June 17, 1971 – Mildred Fox born, Irish Independent politician; Teachta Dála of the Dáil Éireann (member of the lower house of the Oireachtas, Ireland’s Parliament) for Wicklow (1995-2007); also Wicklow County Council member (1995-2003).
- June 17, 1980 – Venus Williams born, American tennis player; a former world No. 1 in both singles and doubles, she won seven Grand Slam singles titles, five at Wimbledon and two at the U.S. Open. She is widely regarded as one of the all-time greats of the sport.
- June 17, 2008 – Hundreds of same-sex couples marry in California on the first full day that gay marriage became legal, by order of the state’s highest court. (California voters banned gay marriage in November, overturned later by the California Supreme Court).
- June 17, 2015 – Loretta Lynch, the first African American woman appointed as U.S. Attorney General, is sworn in by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, using a Bible which once belonged to Frederick Douglass.
- June 17, 2019 – Stella Creasy, Labour Member of Parliament for Walthanstow, spoke out after she experienced two miscarriages, during which she was forced to continue to work her full schedule without any additional support. Parliamentary standards authority does not recognise any form of maternity leave and will not automatically provide extra support for constituency work after an expectant mother gives birth. Creasy says she feels parliament is telling her to “choose between being a mum and being an MP.” Pregnant for a third time, she was told that MPs would not be provided with any additional funding for support staff by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority for the extra help she needed with constituency work. “Heartbroken by all the years that I have struggled with fertility, I’ve kept these events to myself and made sure my constituents have never been affected,” she said. “Now I’m pregnant once more and terrified – not just that it will go wrong again, but because I know that my resolve to keep my private and professional lives separate has become impossible.” One change in the rules had been made in 2019 - the introduction of proxy voting, after Labour MP Tulip Siddiq, heavily pregnant, was forced to delay her caesarean section and cast her vote in a wheelchair. Siddiq said, “They were utterly baffled I was even having a baby, I was passed around and I was told ‘we have not got a historic policy on that because we have not had many women in parliament who give birth’... It was painting a picture that MPs could only be men or older women. I don’t think it was meant to be malicious. I think it was genuinely something that had not been dealt with, but it is the most normal thing in the world, having a baby.”
- June 17, 2020 – Quaker Oats announced it would give its Aunt Jemima brand of syrup and pancake mix a new name and image. These brand products, which dated back 130 years, featured a black woman dubbed Aunt Jemima. She was originally dressed as a minstrel character, although in recent years the company dropped her "mammy" kerchief in response to growing criticism. "We recognize Aunt Jemima's origins are based on a racial stereotype," Kristin Kroepfl, VP and chief marketing officer of Quaker Foods North America, said in a news release. Daina Ramey Berry, a professor of history at the University of Texas, said the decision would eliminate a racist depiction of black women that reflected a "plantation mentality."
- June 17, 2021 – In the UK, a long-awaited government review of the precipitous decline in rape prosecutions promises sweeping reform of how cases are handled in England and Wales, including targets for the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and police to increase the number of prosecutions, and plans to shift the focus of investigations from the victim’s credibility to the perpetrator. The number of prosecutions fell nearly 60% between 2016-2017 and 2019- 2020, even though the number of reports to police increased during that time. Ministers have apologised unreservedly to rape victims, saying they are “deeply ashamed” that thousands of survivors were failed on the government’s watch. Andrea Simon, director of the End Violence Against Women Coalition (EVAW), said that while the review showed a desire to fix the justice system for rape survivors, there was “a distinct lack of urgency, [or] measures which reflect the ambition needed and resourcing of plans to make this a reality.” The police and the CPS have been ordered to work together to increase the number of rape cases making it to court and return prosecutions to 2016 levels before the end of this parliament. Operation Soteria, a pilot program to refocus police and CPS investigations on suspects rather than the complainants’ credibility, will roll out across four police forces by the end of the 2021, before implementation of a national “radical new operating model.” Funding to cover the project for 12 months – £3.2m (just under $4 million USD) – will come from the Home Office.
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- June 18, 1318 – Eleanor of Woodstock born, daughter of King Edward II of England and Isabella of France. Married at age 14 to Reinoud II Duke of Guelders, called “the black” for his dark coloring and his dark character, a widower in his 30s with four daughters, known for having imprisoned his father for over six years. She gave birth to a son in 1333, but quickly bored her husband, so he and the priest Jan Moliart spread the lie that she had leprosy as a pretext for sending her into exile in 1336. But when Reinoud tried to have the marriage annulled, Eleanor arrived at court to contest the annulment, and stripped naked to prove she was no leper. He was forced to take her back, and fortunately for her, he died after a fall from his horse in 1343. Eleanor became regent for her 9-year-old son Reginald, and used her position to have Jan Moliart arrested and imprisoned. When her regency was contested by Jan van Valkenburg, a relative of her late husband, she formally declared her son of legal majority at age 11, to prevent Moliart from gaining control over her son. Eleanor retired from court as Lady of Vekuwe, and was a benefactor of the Order of Saint Clare (‘Poor Clares’). During the 1350s, Reginald fell out with her over making peace with his younger brother Edward, and he confiscated her lands. She died impoverished at age 36 in a Cistercian convent.
- June 18, 1811 – Frances Sargent Osgood born, American poet, very popular during her day; she exchanged poems with Edgar Allen Poe in their correspondence.
- June 18, 1862 – Carolyn Wells born, American author and poet; known for light verse and limericks.
- June 18, 1865 – Fannie Pearson Hardy Eckstorm born, American ornithologist and folklorist.
- June 18, 1873 – United States v. Susan B. Anthony: the stalwart suffragist was tried for voting in the 1872 presidential election. Her position was that the 14th Amendment, intended to give male former slaves U.S. citizenship, including the right to vote, should also apply to women, because it said, “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Since it said all ‘citizens’ and all ‘persons’ and does not specify gender, she contended it should apply to female citizens and persons as well. The Rochester Union and Advertiser editorialized: “Citizenship no more carries the right to vote that it carries the power to fly to the moon…” Susan B. Anthony was allowed to vote, after she threatened to sue the election inspectors if they refused to allow them to vote. A Rochester Democrat named Sylvester Lewis filed a complaint charging Anthony with registering and voting illegally. U.S. Commissioner William C. Storrs, acting on his complaint, issued a warrant for the arrest of Anthony, for violating section 19 of an act of Congress called the Enforcement Act, which carried a maximum penalty of $500 or three years imprisonment. Warrants were issued for the arrest of at least 14other women for voting, but only Anthony was tried. Prior to her trial, she and her supporters wrote hundreds of letters, and she went on tour in Monroe County NY, making a speech called “Is it a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote?” causing such a stir that the prosecutor got a change of venue to Ontario County, where Anthony promptly began another speaking tour. When the trial began, the courtroom was filled to capacity. Her attorney tried to call her to the witness stand, but the judge sustained the district attorney’s objection that “She is not a competent as a witness on her own behalf.” Immediately after the defense council’s two-hour closing argument, the judge took a paper out of his pocket, and read, “The Fourteenth Amendment gives no right to a woman to vote, and the voting by Miss Anthony was in violation of the law. Assuming that Miss Anthony believed she had a right to vote, that fact constitutes no defense if in truth she had not the right. She voluntarily gave a vote which was illegal, and thus is subject to the penalty of the law. Upon this evidence I suppose there is no question for the jury and that the jury should be directed to find a verdict of guilty.” So the jury was not allowed to decide the case. Her attorney argued for a new trial on the grounds that Anthony has been denied a trial by jury, but the judge denied the motion. Before sentencing, the judge asked, “Does the prisoner have anything to say why sentence shall not be pronounced?” Anthony responded, “Yes, your honor, I have many things to say; for in your ordered verdict of guilty, you have trampled underfoot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights, are all alike ignored. Robbed of the fundamental privilege of citizenship, I am degraded from the status of a citizen to that of a subject; and not only myself individually, but all of my sex, are, by your honor’s verdict, doomed to political subjection under this, so-called, form of government.” The judge interrupted, “The Court cannot listen to a rehearsal of arguments the prisoner’s counsel has already consumed three hours in presenting.” But Anthony persisted, even as the judge pounded his gavel, "May it please your honor, I am not arguing the question, but simply stating the reasons why sentence cannot, in justice, be pronounced against me. Your denial of my citizen's right to vote, is the denial of my right of consent as one of the governed, the denial of my right of representation as one of the taxed, the denial of my right to a trial by a jury of my peers as an offender against law, therefore, the denial of my sacred rights to life, liberty, property an – “ The judge banged his gavel and repeatedly ordered her to sit down, but she continued until she said all she intended to say, then sat down, only to be told to rise for sentencing. She was fined $100 and the cost of the prosecution. Anthony refused to pay even “a dollar of the unjust penalty.” The judge, in a move to preclude any appeal to a higher court, responded, “Madam, the Court will not order you committed until the fine is paid.” American women had to fight another 47 years before the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920, recognizing women as citizens with the right to vote. Susan B. Anthony died at age 86, 14 years before the 19th Amendment was ratified.
- June 18, 1900 – Vlasta Adele Vraz born in Chicago, Czech American fundraiser, relief worker, and editor. She lived in Prague (1919-1939), but returned to the U.S. during WWII, to work as a secretary in Washington, DC for the Czech government-in-exile. In 1945, she went back to Czechoslovakia to direct American Relief for Czechoslovakia. Vraz was responsible for distribution of $4 million USD in food, medicine, clothing, and other assistance. For her relief work, she was inducted into the Czech Order of the White Lion in 1946. Yet in 1949, she was arrested by Czech authorities on espionage charges, but released after a week in custody when the U.S. applied diplomatic pressure. She returned to the U.S., became president of the Czechoslovak National Council of America, and edited two publications for the Czechoslovak-American community. Vraz died at age 89, and was buried in Chicago’s Bohemian National Cemetery.
- June 18, 1913 – Sylvia Porter born, American economist, author, and columnist for the New York Post; author of How to Make Money in Government Bonds.
- June 18, 1913 – Françoise Loranger born, French Canadian playwright, radio producer, and feminist; left school at age 15 (no further public education for girls in Québec in 1928); by 17, she was writing short stories for Revue Populaire magazine. She wrote radio scripts (1938-1950), and published her first novel, Mathieu, in 1949. In the 1950s and 60s, she wrote scripts for television dramas, and a theatrical play, Une maison … un jour in 1965; her play, Encore cinq minutes, won the 1967 Governor General’s award for French Drama.
- June 18, 1915 – Alice T. Schafer born, American mathematician; in 1932, she was the only woman mathematics major at the University of Richmond in Virginia, where women were not allowed in the campus library. She won the department’s James D. Crump Prize in mathematics in her junior year, and completed her BA in mathematics in 1936. She worked for the next three years as a secondary school teacher to save enough money for graduate school, which she attended at the University of Chicago. Her field of study was differential geometry of curves and implications of the singular point of a curve; Duke Mathematical Journal from Duke University Press published her initial work in 1944, and the American Journal of Mathematics published her next phase in 1948. After teaching at other schools, she became a full professor at Wellesley College in 1962, where she designed special classes for students who had difficulties with math, expanded to help high school students. A founding member of the Association for Women in Mathematics in 1971, she served as its second president (1973-1974). She retired from Wellesley in 1980, but continued to teach at Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia, until her second retirement in 1996; elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1985, and honored with an Award for Distinguished Service to Mathematics from the Mathematical Association of America in 1998.
- June 18, 1924 – Liesbeth den Uyl born, Dutch activist, feminist, social- democratic politician, and writer. She wrote articles for the feminist publications Opzij and Margriet, and for the Amsterdam newspaper Het Parool. She was also an active member of Roole Vrowen, the women’s organization that campaigned for labour. The "Liesbeth den Uyl-van Vessem Stichting" is named for her, a foundation advocating for women’s rights in countries under dictatorial governments.
- June 18, 1937 – Gail Godwin born, American novelist and short story writer; three of her novels have been finalists for the National Book Award: The Odd Woman, Violet Clay, and A Mother and Two Daughters.
- June 18, 1941 – Delia Smith born, English cook, cookery columnist, author, and television presenter on her programmes Family Fare and How to Cook, and a frequent guest on other shows, until her retirement from television in 2013. Her 1971 best-seller How to Cheat at Cooking, reissued in an updated version in 2008, became a best-seller for the second time. Her influence on household cooking in Britain was dubbed the “Delia Effect” since ingredients or cookware she used on a show would be sold out the following day.
- June 18, 1942 – Pat Hutchins born, English illustrator, children’s book author, and presenter on 45 episodes of the British children’s television series Rosie and Jim; her book, The Wind Blew, was awarded the 1974 Kate Greenaway Medal by the Library Association for best children’s book illustrations.
- June 18, 1948 – Sherry Turkle born, American academic and author in the field of human-technology interaction; professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Her books, The Second Self, and Life on the Screen, discuss computers as part of our social and psychological lives and how they affect the way we view ourselves.
- June 18, 1952 – Isabella Rossellini born, Italian actress, filmmaker, author, activist, and philanthropist; author of Some of Me (1997), Looking at Me (2002), and In the name of the Father, the Daughter and the Holy Spirits: Remembering Roberto Rossellini (2006). She is president and director of the Howard Gilman Foundation—a leading institution focused on the preservation of wildlife, arts, photography, and dance, and has served on the board of the Wildlife Conservation Network. She is also involved in training guide dogs for the blind, and is a National Ambassador for the U.S. Fund for UNICEF.
- June 18, 1960 – Barbara Broccoli born, American film producer, noted for her work on the James Bond franchise, and staging musical theatre versions of successful films.
- June 18, 1961 – Angela Johnson born, African American poet, children’s and young adult author. She won three Coretta Scott King Awards, for: Toning the Sweep (1994), Heaven (1999), and The First Part Last (2004), which also won an American Library Association award.
- June 18, 1962 – Lisa Randall born, American theoretical physicist working in particle physics and cosmology; professor of science on the Harvard physics faculty; contributor to the Randall-Sundrum model, a five-dimensional warped geometry theory, which she co-published in 1999 with Raman Sundrum; honored with the 2007 Lilienfeld Prize and the 2012 Andrew Germant Award. Her controversial Dark Matter Disk Model posits that 66 million years ago, a tiny twitch caused by an invisible force in the far reaches of the cosmos hurled a comet three times the width of Manhattan toward Earth. The collision produced the most powerful earthquake of all time and released energy a billion times that of an atomic bomb, superheating the atmosphere which killed three-quarters of life on Earth. Author of Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions; and Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World.
- June 18, 1964 – Patti Webster born, American entertainment publicist for notable recording artists, actors, and athletes, such as Alisha Keys, Usher, Halle Berry and Chris Paul; author of It Happened in Church: Stories of Humor from the Pulpit to the Pews (2008); member of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences; Webster died of cancer in 2013 at age 49.
- June 18, 1970 – Katie Derham born, newscaster and presenter who has worked for BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4 (1995-1998, and since 2010) and ITN/ITV news (1998-2010).
- June 18, 1972 – Anu Tali born, Estonian conductor; Music Director of the Sarasota Orchestra in Florida (2013-2019), and the co-founder of the Nordic Symphony Orchestra; Estonia honored her with the Cultural Award of Estonia in 2003, and she received the Presidential Award of Estonia in 2004.
- June 18, 1980 – Shakuntala Devi, Indian writer and mental calculator, wins a place in the Guinness Book of Records, by mentally multiplying two randomly generated numbers of 13 digits each from the computer department of the Imperial College London, and produced the correct answer in just 28 seconds: 7,686,369,774,870 x 2,465,099,745,779 = 18,947,668,177,995,426,462,773,730
- June 18, 1983 – NASA Astronaut Sally K. Ride becomes America’s first woman in space when she and four colleagues blast off aboard the space shuttle Challenger.
- June 18, 1983 – Mona Mahmudnizhad, a 17-year-old Iranian Bahá’í, the youngest of ten Bahá’í women sentenced to death and hanged in Shiraz, Iran, because of their Bahá’í Faith. The official charges against Mahmudnizhad ranged from “misleading children and youth” because she taught children expelled from school for their beliefs, to being a “Zionist” because the Bahá’í World Centre is located in Israel.
- June 18, 2006 – Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori is elected as the first woman presiding bishop for the Episcopal Church, U.S. arm of the global Anglican Communion.
- June 18, 2013 – Russia passes a law banning same-sex couples, singles, and unmarried couples from countries where same-sex marriage is legal from adopting Russian children. Single Russians may adopt, but adopting couples must be married. In 2012, Russia had banned all adoptions by Americans; an estimated 600,000 Russian orphans remained in their care system in 2013.
- June 18, 2019 – Brazilian soccer superstar Marta scored her 17th World Cup goal, making her the top-scorer in tournament history for both men and women. In celebration of her record-breaking goal, Marta pointed to her cleat, where an equal sign in pink and blue signified her commitment to gender equality in sport and beyond.
- June 18, 2019 – In the Netherlands, Eindhoven University of Technology, one of Europe’s leading engineering universities, announced that as of July 1, it will open its job vacancies exclusively to women candidates for at least the next 18 months in order to overcome the institution’s “implicit gender bias.” Frank Baaijens, the university’s rector, said progress toward a better balance of women and men in academic roles has been stubbornly slow. He said, “We attach great importance to equal respect and opportunities for women and men. And it has long been known that a diverse workforce performs better. It leads to better strategies, more creative ideas and faster innovation.” Under the new recruitment policy, men will only be eligible for any academic post if no qualified woman candidate is found within six months of a job becoming available. This is a five-year programme, during which about 150 positions are expected to become vacant. Depending on the success of recruiting women during the first 18 months, the proportion of vacancies only open to women may be adjusted. An additional 100,000 Euros will be allocated toward each new woman hired, for mentoring her and funding her own research projects.
- June 18, 2020 – Mary Elizabeth Taylor, Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs (2018-2020), submitted her resignation to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, citing disagreement with Donald Trump's response to racial injustice. Taylor, 30, was the youngest person, and the first black woman to hold the position, and the only African-American State Department senior official under the Trump Administration. "Moments of upheaval can change you, shift the trajectory of your life, and mold your character," she wrote in her resignation letter, which was obtained by The Washington Post. "The president's comments and actions surrounding racial injustice and black Americans cut sharply against my core values and convictions." Prior to joining the State Department, she was an aide to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Republican-Kentucky) and worked in the Trump White House as deputy director for nominations.
- June 18, 2021 – In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s rightwing government passed legislation earlier in June banning portrayals of gay people or LGBT+ content from school educational materials, children’s television programs, or ads aimed at children. In May 2020, parliament passed a law ending legal recognition of trans people, preventing people from altering their gender or name on official documents. Then in November 2020, they passed legislation that allows only heterosexual couples to adopt children. So the Budapest Pride organization has plans for a huge Pride parade and celebration in defiance of Orbán’s legislation. Viktória Radványi of Budapest Pride says, “We are planning to show all the people who are afraid and anxious and think they cannot be happy because this government is crushing human rights and freedom of speech and freedom of the media that there is hope, and that there are a lot of people who are more and more organised.” She pointed to a recent Ipsos poll which found that more than 60% of Hungarian people believed that same sex parents were “just as likely as other parents” to raise a child well. “A majority – we never expected that result after two years of hate campaigning,” she said. “Our personal experience was the same and now this poll … has confirmed it: that Hungarian people are not as hateful and much less homophobic than the government.” The European Commission launched legal action against Orbán’s government over the law, saying it contravenes European values of tolerance and individual freedom. In July, 2021, thousands of Hungarians marched in the Budapest Pride’s largest parade ever to support the rights of LGBTQ+ people.
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- June 19, 1833 – Mary Tenney Gray born, American suffragist, editorial writer, club-woman, and philanthropist; editorial staffer for the New York Teacher, the Leavenworth Home Record (dedicated to the welfare and elevation of women), and the Kansas Farmer, and a contributor or correspondent to leading Kansas magazines and newspapers; in 1859, lobbied for voting rights for women to be included in the state constitution at the Wyandotte Convention, but was unsuccessful. She was a leader in women’s clubs formed for art, education, literary, and philanthropic purposes, and was a co-founder and first president of the Social Science Club of Kansas and Western Missouri, which was a statewide association of most local clubs in the area, the first of its kind in what was then the West, holding conventions where women could hear speakers and combine the efforts of their organizations; Gray read papers at the conventions, and at many other state gatherings, such as her paper, “Women and Kansas City’s Development.” After her death in 1904, the Kansas Federation of Women’s Clubs dedicated a monument to her memory in Kansas City.
- June 19, 1843 – Mary Sibbet Copley Thaw born, American philanthropist and charity worker who funded archaeology research, including supporting the work of women archaeologists like Alice Fletcher and Zelia Nuttall, and founded the Thaw Fellowship at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard. She was also the primary philanthropist supporting the Omaha Presbyterian Theological Seminary.
- June 19, 1856 – Elisabeth Marbury born, pioneering American theatrical and literary agent whose clients included Oscar Wilde, James M. Barrie, George Bernard Shaw, Edmond Rostand, dancers Vernon and Irene Castle, and children’s author Frances Hodgson Burnett (The Secret Garden).
- June 19, 1865 – Dame May Whitty born as Mary Louise Webster, distinguished English stage and film actress. In 1918, she and opera singer Nellie Melba were the first two women entertainers to made Dame Commanders of the British Empire. Witty was honoured for her volunteer work during WWI for the Three Arts Women’s Employment Fund and the British Women’s Hospital Committee. She was also chair of the Actresses’ Franchise League, a British suffrage organization for women who were or had been in the theatrical profession. At the age of 72, she made her Hollywood film debut in Night Must fall, with Robert Montgomery and Rosalind Russell, for which she was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. She is probably better remembered as Miss Froy, the title character in Alfred Hitchcock’s film, The Lady Vanishes, and as Lady Beldon in Mrs. Miniver, which earned her another Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. May Whitty died at age 82 in 1948 in Beverly Hills, CA. Her final film, The Return of October, was released four months after her death.
- June 19, 1881 – Maginel Wright Enright born, American graphic artist, and children’s author and illustrator, who illustrated some of L. Frank Baum’s earliest books, well before his Oz series, which he often wrote under pen names. She also designed high-fashion shoes for Capezio, and covers for magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal and McClure’s.
- June 19, 1883 – Gladys Mills Phipps born, American thoroughbred racehorse owner-breeder, founder of the Phipps family horseracing dynasty, dubbed “First Lady of the Turf.”
- June 19, 1885 – Adela Pankhurst born, British suffragette, daughter of Emmeline Pankhurst, head of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU); after she moved to Australia in 1913, she broke with her mother’s policy of supporting the WWI British war effort, and made anti-war and anti-conscription speeches.
- June 19, 1888 – Hilda Worthington Smith born, labor educator and social worker, first Director of Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers in Industry (founded in 1921). The school was an 8-week liberal arts course for factory workers, many of them immigrants, and only a handful had more than a few years of elementary school education. A number of the young women who attended went on to become labor leaders.
- June 19, 1900 – Laura Hobson born, American novelist and short story writer; best known for her novel Gentleman’s Agreement.
- June 19, 1903 – Mary Callery born, American artist known for her Modern and Abstract Expressionist sculpture; part of the New York art movement from the 1940s through the 1960s; in 1930s Paris, she bought work by Picasso, Duchamps, Calder, and Matisse; was commissioned in the 1960s to create a sculpture for the top of the proscenium arch at the Met (Metropolitan Opera House) in Manhattan.
- June 19, 1919 – Pauline Kael born, influential American film critic for The New Yorker magazine (1968-1991). Known for her controversial essays on Orson Welles and Citizen Kane in which she disputed the co-author screenplay credit for Welles.
- June 19, 1922 – Marilyn P. Johnson born, U.S. career diplomat; after serving in the U.S. Navy during WWII, she taught English as a foreign language in schools in Cameroon and Mali; joined the U.S. Foreign Service in 1964, and worked in Mali, Tunisia, and Niger in cultural affairs and public affairs; Deputy Assistant Director of the Information Centers Program (1971-1974); after two years learning Russian, she was the cultural affairs officer in Moscow (1976-1978); also served as U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Togo (1978-1981).
- June 19, 1926 – Erna Schneider Hoover born, American mathematician and inventor of a computerized telephone switching method which revolutionized modern communication, by monitoring call traffic centers and prioritizing tasks, preventing system overloads during peak calling times. Working at Bell Laboratories for over 32 years, Hoover was an important pioneer for women in the field of computer technology. A graduate with honors from Wellesley College in 1948, she earned a Ph.D. from Yale University in philosophy and foundations of mathematics in 1951. Hoover was a professor at Swarthmore College (1951-1954), but was unable to gain tenure, probably because she married in 1953. Her husband, Charles Wilson Hoover Jr., was very supportive of her career aspirations. In 1954, she became a senior technical associate at Bell Labs, and was promoted in 1956. At this time, switching systems were moving from electronic to computer-based technologies. Hoover was able to use her knowledge of symbolic logic and feedback theory to develop the Stored Program Control System, which programmed the call center mechanisms to use data about incoming calls to impose order on the whole system, giving priority to input and output processes over less urgent processes like record keeping and billing. The idea came to her in the hospital after she gave birth to her second daughter. The Bell Labs Lawyers handling the patent had to go to her house so she could sign the papers while she was on maternity leave.
- June 19, 1936 – Marisa Galvany born, American soprano, a principal singer at New York City Opera (1972-1983).
- June 19, 1940 – Shirley Muldowney born, race car driver, first woman to get a National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) license to drive a Top Fuel dragster; won the NHRA Top Fuel championship in 1977, 1980, and 1982, becoming first person to win two and then three Top Fuel titles.
- June 19, 1942 – Merata Mita born, New Zealand filmmaker and key figure in the growth of the Māori film industry; first Māori woman to solely write and direct a dramatic feature film, Mauri, in 1988, after making the landmark documentary films Bastion Point: Day 507 in 1980, and Patu! in 1983.
- June 19, 1945 – Aung San Sun Kyi born, Burmese politician, activist, and author, Chair of the National League for Democracy, recipient of the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, and the Nobel Peace Prize. She was the first State Counsellor of Myanmar (2016-2021), but deposed and arrested in February 2021, by the military during the 2021 Myanmar coup d'état after it declared the November 2020 Myanmar general election results fraudulent. She was charged with multiple counts of corruption in a series of trials, described by the deputy director for Asia of Human Rights Watch as a "courtroom circus of secret proceedings on bogus charges," and sentenced to 13 years in prison.
- June 19, 1954 – Kathleen Turner born, American film and stage actress, director, feminist, and social justice and human rights activist; winner of two Golden Globes, nominated for an Academy Award and twice for Tony Awards. Her very busy career as an actress was drastically impacted in the 1990s by rheumatoid arthritis, which became so severe she could barely walk. The medication used to treat the disease altered her appearance, but the disease continued to progress for eight years before new treatments became available, which put her arthritis into remission. Turner has been an active supporter of Planned Parenthood since the early 1970s, serves on the board of People for the American Way, and volunteers for Amnesty International and Citymeals-on-Wheels. She also works to raise awareness of rheumatoid arthritis.
- June 19, 1955 – Mary Schapiro born, first woman permanent appointment as Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC, 2009-2012); Chair and CEO of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA, 2006-2009); National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD, 1996-2005); Chair of Commodity Futures Trading Commission (1994-1996).
- June 19, 1957 – Anna Lindh born, Swedish Social Democratic politician, Minister of Foreign Affairs (1998-2003); Chair of the Council of the European Union (2001); Minister for the Environment (1994-1996); Member of the Riksdag (Parliament, 1982-1985 and 1998-2003). Lindh was assassinated in September 2003, stabbed to death by a man born in Sweden to Serbian parents, who was found to be mentally ill.
- June 19, 1957 – Jean Rabe born, American author of science fiction and fantasy tie-in books and stories for games and movies, such as Dragonlance, and Star Wars; editor of numerous science fiction anthologies.
- June 19, 1965 – Sadie Frost born, English stage and film actress and film producer; founder of Blonde to Black Pictures.
- June 19, 1972 – Robin Tunney born, American actress best known for playing Teresa Lisbon on the television series The Mentalist (2008-2015). In 2006, she won $200,000 for her charity of choice, The Children’s Health Fund, on Celebrity Poker Showdown, coming in second at the final table.
- June 19, 2015 – International Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict proclaimed by the UN General Assembly, to commemorate adoption in 2008 of Resolution 1820, “to eliminate all forms of violence against women and girls, including by ending impunity and by ensuring the protection of civilians, in particular women and girls, during and after armed conflicts, in accordance with the obligations States have undertaken under international humanitarian law and international human rights law.”
- June 19, 2019 – Joy Harjo, Muscogee Creek Nation poet, author, and musician, was named as the U.S. Library of Congress 2019-2020 Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, the first Native American named as U.S. Poet Laureate.
- June 19, 2019 – After a scandal in 2018 uncovered several medical schools in Japan had manipulated exam results to give an advantage to first-time male applicants over women, Juntendo University in Tokyo decided to “abolish the unfair treatment of female applicants.” In 2019, of the 1,679 woman applicants who took Juntendo’s entrance examinations, 8.28% passed. Of the 2,202 male candidates, 7.72% passed the exam. This was the first time in seven years that the pass rate among women was higher than among men. The pass rate among women was also higher than male candidates at other medical schools. The sexist admissions policy drew widespread criticism after the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper broke the story that for over a decade the exams were rigged to help male candidates, because of “concerns” that women who went on to become doctors would take long maternity leaves or leave the profession entirely to have children. Japan Joint Association of Medical Professional Women member Dr Rurioko Tshushima said: "If doctors are having to work long hours to cover maternity leave, that is not a problem with the capability of female doctors, it is a problem with the system." In 2016, women accounted for just 21.1% of all doctors in Japan, the lowest level among nations belonging to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Japan has an ongoing shortage of doctors – only 2.4 doctors for every 1,000 residents – compared to 3.4 doctors for other OECD member countries.
- June 19, 2019 – Louisville Mayor Greg Fisher announced that one of the three officers involved in the shooting of Breonna Taylor had been fired. Taylor, who was Black, was a 26-year-old emergency room technician. The police broke into her home on March 13 using a no-knock warrant related to drug dealers who lived far from Taylor's apartment. After a short confrontation, the police “blindly” shot Taylor at least eight times, killing her. Interim Louisville police Chief Robert Schroeder confirmed that the department fired Officer Brett Hankison. "I find your conduct a shock to the conscience," Schroeder wrote in a Friday letter to Hankison. The other two officers involved in the shooting are on administrative reassignment, with investigations ongoing.
- June 19, 2020 – Speaking in an interview with Harper’s Bazaar, actress Keira Knightly was asked if she had ever experienced sexual harassment, and responded, “Yes! I mean, everybody has. Literally, I don’t know anyone who hasn’t been in some way, whether it’s being flashed at, or groped, or some guy saying they’re going to slit your throat, or punching you in the face, or whatever it is, everybody has ... It was when women started listing all the precautions they take when they walk home to make sure they’re safe, and I thought, ‘I do every single one of them, and I don’t even think about it.’” She called the situation “fucking depressing.”
- June 19, 2021 – Over 1000 women traveled from 70 of Turkey’s 81 provinces to demonstrate in Istanbul against their government’s withdrawal from the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, ironically dubbed the Istanbul Convention, because the convention was adopted at the 121st Session of the Committee of Ministers, held in Istanbul in 2011. At the time, Turkey was the first country to ratify the convention, ratified by 67 other countries between 2012 and 2019, and now in effect. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s withdrawing his country from the treaty in March 2021 sent shockwaves throughout Turkey, with women’s rights activists calling the move an attempt to relegate women to “second class citizens.” Religious and conservative groups oppose the convention, claiming it encourages divorce and undermines traditional family values. They are especially vocal about the clause requiring government to protect victims from discrimination regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity, saying this clause may lead to gay marriage. Gokce Gokcen, an opposition party member of parliament and supporter of women’s rights, tweeted, “You are failing to protect the right to life.”
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- June 20, 1786 – Marceline Desbordes-Valmore born, French poet and novelist; an orphan by 16, she became an actress and singer at the Paris Opéra-Comique and other theatres, but retired from the stage in 1823. In 1819, she was one of the founders of French romantic poetry when she published her first poetic work, Élégies et Romances, followed in 1821 by her narrative Veillées des Antilles, and five more volumes of poetry between 1825 and 1860 (the last one published posthumously). She was the only woman writer included in the notable Les Poètes maudits anthology published by Paul Verlaine in 1884.
- June 20, 1847 – “Gina” Krog born as Jørgine Sverdrup Krog, Norwegian suffragist, writer, editor, teacher, and politician. She was a leading campaigner for women’s right to vote; co-founder in 1884 of the Norwegian Association for Women’s Rights with newspaper editor and Liberal MP Hagbard Berner. Also a founding member of the Norwegian National Women’s Council, and spearheaded presentation of women’s suffrage proposals to the Storting (the parliament of Norway). Krog wrote articles, made speeches, attended international women’s rights conferences in Europe and North America, and was the editor (1887-1916) of Nylænde (New Land), a Norwegian feminist periodical. Krog was an early member of the Liberal Party, serving as a deputy member of its national board. After much petitioning, the Norwegian government granted limited voting rights to women in 1910. Norwegian women who owned property – or whose husbands owned property – could vote in municipal elections. In 1913, the Storting voted unanimously to extend universal women's suffrage to general elections. Krog died in 1916 during an influenza epidemic at age 68. She was the first woman in Norway honoured with a funeral at public expense. The Prime Minister, the President of the Storting, and the Supreme court Chief Justice attended her funeral.
- June 20, 1868 – Helen Miller Gould Shepard born, American heiress and philanthropist; during the Spanish-American War, she gave $50,000 toward military hospital supplies, and was active in the Women’s National War Relief Association, working in a hospital for wounded soldiers. She donated the library building at New York University and gave $10,000 for the NYU engineering school. She also gave contributions to Rutgers College, the YMCA, and the YWCA, and served on the national board of the YWCA.
- June 20, 1884 – Mary R. Calvert born, American astronomical computer and astrophotographer; began working at the Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin for her uncle, astronomer Edward E. Barnard, as an assistant and human computer in 1905; when Barnard died in 1923, she became curator of the Yerkes photographic plate collection and a high-level assistant until her retirement in 1946; co-author, with Frank Elmore Ross, of Atlas of the Northern Milky Way, published in 1934.
- June 20, 1891 – Giannina Arangi-Lombardi born, prominent Italian spinto soprano (a lyric soprano voice which can be “pushed” to achieve dramatic climaxes without strain); she sang at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan (1924-1930), and toured internationally; known for her performances in operas by Donizetti, Verdi, and Puccini.
- June 20, 1893 – Lizzie Borden is acquitted of the murders of her father and stepmother. No one else is charged with the crime.
- June 20, 1895 – Carolyn Willard Baldwin receives the first ever Ph.D. in Science awarded to a woman by an American university, from Cornell University, graduating third in her class; Baldwin was also the first woman to earn a Bachelor of Science degree from the School of Mechanics at the University of California. She taught physics at a vocational secondary school, barred from teaching at university level because she was married.
- June 20, 1897 – Elisabeth Hauptmann born, German author and playwright; best known for her collaboration with Berthold Brecht on the The Threepenny Opera. With the rise of the Nazis, she went into exile in the U.S. (1934-1949), then worked as a dramaturg for the Berlin Ensemble after returning to Germany.
- June 20, 1905 – Lillian Hellman born, American playwright and screenwriter; Toys in the Attic, The Children’s Hour and The Little Foxes; she was blacklisted by Hollywood after she refused to answer when questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committee.
- June 20, 1910 – Josephine Johnson born, American author and poet, won the 1935 Pulitzer Prize for her novel Now in November.
- June 20, 1911 – Gail Patrick born, American actress and executive producer, noted for producing the Perry Mason television series.
- June 20, 1914 – Zelda Schneersohn Mishkovsky born, Israeli poet; awarded the Brenner Prize, Bialik Prize for Literature, and the Wertheim Prize.
- June 20, 1914 – Muazzez İlmiye Çığ born, Turkish archaeologist, Assyriologist, and author, specialist in the Sumerian civilization, notable for her painstaking research and success in deciphering cuneiform tablets; advocate for secularism and women’s rights in Turkey; her 2005 book, Bereket Kültü ve Mabet Fahişeliği (Cult of Fertility and Holy Prostitution), caused a storm of controversy because her research into the history of the khimar, the headscarf worn by Islamic women, revealed it did not originate in the Muslim world, but was worn 5,000 years ago by Sumerian priestesses who initiated young men into sex. She and her publisher were charged with “inciting hatred based on religious differences.” She testified at the first hearing in 2006: “I am a woman of science ... I never insulted anyone.” The charges were dismissed; she and her publisher were acquitted, in less than half an hour.
- June 20, 1917 – Helena Rasiowa born, Polish mathematician, her work on algebraic logic continues to be highly influential; during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, her family’s home and all its contents, including all her notes and the only copy of her Master’s thesis were burned; she rewrote the thesis, and got her Masters in 1945, then her Doctorate in 1950.
- June 20, 1921 – Alice Robertson (Republican-Oklahoma) becomes the first woman to chair the U.S. House of Representatives.
- June 20, 1927 – Simin Behbahani born as Simin Khalili, Iranian icon of contemporary Persian poetry, lyricist, and activist, dubbed “the lioness of Iran.” She was a major force in bringing the ghazal, a traditional Persian verse form somewhat like an ode, into modern usage; President of the Iranian Writers Association. Behbahani faced a constant threat of censorship and arrest after the Iranian Revolution in 1979, but was honored with international awards for both her poetry and her humanitarian and civil rights advocacy, including the Simone de Beauvoir Prize for Women’s Freedom in 2009, and the Janus Pannonius Poetry Prize (2013).
- June 20, 1929 – Edith Windsor born, American LGBT rights activist and IBM technology manager, honored by the National Computing Conference in 1987 as a pioneer in operating systems. She and her partner were legally married in Toronto Canada in 2007, after being registered domestic partners in New York since 1993; when her wife died in 2009, Windsor was executor and sole beneficiary. As a spouse, she should have qualified for a spousal deduction, and paid no federal estate taxes. Windsor was forced to pay $363,053.00 to the IRS because the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) specified in Section 3 that the term “spouse” only applied to marriages between a man and a woman. She filed a lawsuit against the federal government, United States v. Windsor; the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to overturn Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act as violating due process guarantees of the Fifth Amendment, considered a landmark legal victory for the U.S. same-sex marriage movement.
- June 20, 1930 – Magdalena Abakanowicz born, Polish sculptor, fiber artist, and educator.
- June 20, 1933 – Claire Tomalin born, English author and biographer of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Pepys, Jane Austen, Katherine Mansfield, the actress Mrs. Jordan, and Mary Wollstonecraft; Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self and The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft each won the Whitbread Book Award.
- June 20, 1938 – Joan Kirner born, Australian Labor politician; Premier of Victoria (1990-1992); Deputy Premier of Victoria (1989-1990); member of the Parliament of Victoria (1988-1994).
- June 20, 1945 – Anne Murray born, Canadian singer; first Canadian woman soloist to reach #1 on the U.S. charts, and the first to earn a Gold record, for her song "Snowbird" (1970). She was Honorary National Chair of the Canadian Save The Children Fund, and an active supporter of Colon Cancer Canada, as well as environmentalist David Suzuki’s Nature Challenge.
- June 20, 1951 – Sheila McLean born, distinguished Scottish legal scholar and author; first appointee as an International Bar Association Professor of Law and Ethics in Medicine, and director of the Institute of Law and Medical Ethics at the University of Glasgow; book review editor for Medical Law International, a quarterly law review; UK Adviser to the European branch of the World Health Organization on revision of its ‘Health for All’ policy; member of the UNESCO Biomedical Ethics Committee.
- June 20, 1967 – Nicole Kidman born in Australia, Australian-American actress and producer; won the 2003 Academy Award for Best Actress for The Hours. She has been a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF and the UN Development Fund for Women.
- June 20, 1983 – Patrisse Cullors born, American civil rights activist, co-founder of #BlackLivesMatter; she is also an advocate for defunding the police and LGBTQ+ rights. Author of When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir.
- June 20, 1988 – New York State Club Association Inc. v. City of New York: The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld a New York law making it illegal for private clubs with more than 400 members to discriminate against women and minorities. Lynn Hecht Schafran, a lawyer for the National Organization for Women, called it the “latest in a line of cases recognizing the harm done to a large number of women and minorities when they are excluded from organizations and clubs which are central to the business, civic, professional, and public life of the country.”
- June 20, 2016 – Virginia Raggi elected as Rome’s first woman Mayor - and youngest at age 37 - (2016-2021); was previously a member of Rome’s City Council (2013-2016).
- June 20, 2019 – The Conservative Party in Britain plunged into scandal when Mark Field, the Foreign Office Minister, was caught on camera grabbing and manhandling a woman, one of the Greenpeace protesters who disrupted Chancellor Philip Hammond’s speech at Mansion House, trying to call attention to the planet’s growing climate crisis. Field shoved the woman against a pillar, gripped her by the back of her neck, and marched her away. Greenpeace UK said: “We were shocked at the footage of an elected MP and government minister assaulting one of our peaceful protesters at the Mansion House tonight.” City of London Police said they were looking into the incident. Field was suspended as minister. Ironically, Field had delivered a speech in May at a Westminster Hall debate in which he decried violence against and intimidation of female activists across the world.
- June 20, 2020 – Melina Abdullah of BLM Los Angeles and Patrisse Cullors, chair of the BLM Global Network Foundation, had for years relentlessly protested against the Los Angeles Police Department’s racial bias, advocating for criminal justice reform, speaking out at Police Commission meetings, and picketing City Hall. With 500 members, the L.A. chapter became one of the biggest and most influential in the BLM network. The chapter helps families who lost a loved one to police violence by ordering and paying for independent autopsies, which can cost upwards of $6,000. Abdullah said those autopsies can make all the difference in wrongful-death lawsuits. BLM also requests body-cam video from police departments, removes law enforcement officials’ narration, and puts the raw footage back out on social media. “We try to strip it of their narrative, so that people can see what actually happened,” Abdullah said. During the nation-wide protests over the police killing of George Floyd, Black Lives Matter became a mainstream movement, with an estimated 100,000 participants at the BLM protest on June 7 in Hollywood alone, and protests in over 2,000 cities and towns in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Cullors said, “This is a movement led and envisioned and directed by Black women,” she said. “Many of us are queer, we’re moms, and we really started this work because we wanted to see our children survive. We’re laying the groundwork and foundation for a new world, not just for our descendants but for right now.” She describes BLM, declaring, “We didn’t build it as a policy think tank; we built it as a cultural movement. That’s why everybody feels moved by it. It’s why it tugs at people’s hearts. It’s why it pisses people off. It’s why people felt like they had to pick a side.”
- June 20, 2021 – UN Women asked artists from all over the world to visualize what gender equality means to them, and received over 1,000 submissions.
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- June 21, 1528 – Maria of Austria born, daughter of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain; married at age 20 to her cousin, Archduke Maximillian. They served as co-regents (1548-1551) while her father was occupied with German affairs, and she returned to Madrid in 1558 to act as regent of Spain on her own while her brother, now King Philip II, was absent (1558-1561). She became Holy Roman Empress consort when her husband became Holy Roman Emperor Maximillian II. She bore 16 children during their 28-year marriage, outlived her husband by 27 years, and died at age 74 at a convent in Madrid.
- June 21, 1734 – Marie-Joseph Angélique, a slave in New France, is put to death, having been convicted of setting the fire that destroyed much of Old Montreal. Scholars do not agree about her guilt or innocence, but her testimony gives insight into slavery in Canada then.
- June 21, 1846 – Marian Adams-Acton born, Scottish non-fiction writer (mostly about dogs and travel), playwright, and children’s author; often under pen name “Jeanie Hering.”
- June 21, 1870 – Clara Immerwahr born, German chemist of Jewish descent; first woman awarded a doctorate in chemistry in Germany (magna cum laude); a women’s rights advocate who was frustrated with the limitations marriage to chemist Fritz Haber placed on her; unable to work outside the home, she contributed to her husband’s work without recognition, and translated some of his papers into English; during WWI, she disapproved of Haber’s work on chemical weapons, including the first mass use of poison gas, at the second Battle of Ypres in Belgium. She spoke out against the research as a “perversion of the ideals of science.” In 1915, shortly after he returned from Belgium, she committed suicide, using his military pistol to shoot herself in the chest, and died in her 13-year-old son Hermann’s arms. Haber left the next day to stage the first gas attack against the Russians on the Eastern Front.
- June 21, 1883 – Daisy Turner born, American storyteller, noted for oral recording of her family history traced back to Africa and England; at age 103, she was featured in Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary reciting a poem.
- June 21, 1906 – Grete Sultan born, German-American pianist; gave her last recital at Merkin Concert Hall in New York at the age of 90.
- June 21, 1912 – Mary McCarthy, American novelist, critic, and liberal activist; her most successful novel, The Group, remained on the Best Seller List for two years. In 1967 and 1969, she traveled to North and South Vietnam, reporting on the Vietnam War from an anti-war perspective, and published two books, Vietnam, and Hanoi.
- June 21, 1918 – Josephine Webb born, pioneering American woman electrical engineer, held two patents for oil circuit breaker contact design, nicknamed “switchgear.” In 1942, she worked for Westinghouse as a Design Engineer on the electrical grids for the Coulee, Hoover, and Boulder Dams. In 1946, while working as Director of Development for Alden Products, she designed an 18 inch, full newspaper size fax machine with superior resolution. Co-founded Webb Consulting Company with her husband Herbert, another electrical engineer, specializing in electrical-electronic measurement instrumentation, communications applications, and photographic test devices.
- June 21, 1921 – Judy Holliday born, American comedian, stage and film actress, and singer; she originated the Billie Dawn role in Born Yesterday on stage, and won an Oscar for Best Actress for playing the character in the film version. She used the character to her advantage when she was suspected of being “pro-Communist” in 1952, and subpoenaed by Senator Pat McCarran's Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. Her legal counsel, Simon Rifkind, advised her to “play dumb,” so she played ‘Billie Dawn’ for the committee, avoided naming any names, and was cleared by the anti-Communist investigation. Her career was unaffected, unlike many others in the entertainment industry whose careers were damaged just by being investigated.
- June 21, 1925 – Larisa Avdeyeva born, Russian mezzo-soprano; star of the Bolshoi Opera for 30 years, noted for her performances in Rimsky-Korsakov works and the title role in Bizet’s opera Carmen. In 1964, she was honored as a People’s Artist of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.
- June 21, 1931 – Margaret Heckler born, American Republican politician, member of the U.S. House of Representatives (1967-1983); Secretary of Health and Human Services (1983-1985); and Ambassador to Ireland (1986-1989). Heckler was an advocate for women’s issues, including the Equal Rights Amendment and Title IX, which prohibited sex discrimination in education, and was a co-founder and co-chairwoman of the bipartisan Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues.
- June 21, 1935 – Françoise Sagan born, French novelist, playwright, and screenwriter; Bonjour Tristesse (Hello Sadness); Un certain sourire (A Certain Smile); Château en Suède (Château in Sweden); and La Chamade (That Mad Ache).
- June 21, 1940 – Mariette Hartley born, American actress and founder of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Notable for her performances in Ride the High Country and The Last Hurrah, and her many guest appearances on television series. Hartley is a three-time Emmy winner for Outstanding Lead Actress. She also appeared onstage in her one-woman show, If You Get to Bethlehem, You've Gone Too Far, and as Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter. But most television viewers recognize her from the popular TV commercials she made with James Garner for Polaroid cameras, where the rapport between the two convinced some viewers they were married in real life. Hartley had a t-shirt printed with “I am not Mrs. James Garner,” to which Garner’s wife Lois responded with a t-shirt of her own, “I am Mrs. James Garner.” When their contracts for the commercials came up for renewal, James Garner discovered he was paid considerably more than Mariette Hartley, and struck a blow for equal pay by refusing to sign his contract until her contract was for the same amount as his. Hartley is a long-time suicide prevention activist, and promotes awareness of bipolar disorder, because of her father’s suicide.
- June 21, 1942 – Marjorie Margolies born, American journalist, Democratic politician, academic, and women’s rights activist; U.S. Representative from Pennsylvania (1993-1995); Director/Deputy Chair of the U.S. delegation to the UN’s 4th World Conference on Women (1995); Founder and Chair of Women’s Campaign International (WCI), which provides advocacy training for women throughout the world; adjunct professor at Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania; author of The Girls in the Newsroom, and co-author of They Came to Stay.
- June 21, 1943 – Diane Marleau born, Canadian Liberal politician, Member of the Canadian House of Commons for Sudbury (1988-2008); Minister for International Cooperation (1997-1999); Minister of Public Works (1996-1997); Minister of National Health and Welfare (1993-1996).
- June 21, 1946 – Kate Hoey born, British Labour politician; Member of Parliament for Vauxhall since 1989; she was Minister for Sport and the Olympics (1999-2001).
- June 21, 1947 – Shirin Ebadi born, Iranian lawyer, judge, author, human and women’s rights activist. The first woman judge in Iran (1969-1979), she was forced to leave the bench after the Islamic Revolution. In 2000, Ebadi was jailed for three weeks and suspended from practicing law for five years after being accused of releasing a supposedly slanderous video about members of the government. She was the recipient of the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize for her work for democracy and human rights, especially women's, children's, and refugee rights, the first Iranian and first Muslim woman to be honored with the peace prize. In 2006, she published her memoir, Iran Awakening: One Woman's Journey to Reclaim Her Life and Country, followed by Refugee Rights in Iran in 2008, when she began receiving death threats. After her office was raided and closed down without explanation by Iranian security forces in December 2008, Ebadi went into exile in the UK as Iran’s government continued to increase persecution of any citizens critical of its policies. By the end of 2009, Iran had her bank accounts frozen. In 2011, her book, The Golden Cage: Three Brothers, Three Choices, One Destiny, was published, and in 2016, Until We Are Free: My Fight for Human Rights in Iran.
- June 21, 1950 – Anne Carson born, Canadian poet, essayist, translator, and Classics professor; she won the 1996 Lannan Literary Award, a 1997 Pushcart Prize, and the 2001 T.S. Eliot Prize for The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos.
- June 21, 1951 – Lenore Manderson born, Australian medical anthropologist; early research in Tropical Health led to her becoming a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences; her later research concerns social history, public health, and anthropology, studying the effects of inequality, social exclusion, and marginality on health and public health policy; professor at Monash University since 2005.
- June 21, 1953 – Benazir Bhutto born, Pakistani stateswoman and politician; Prime Minister of Pakistan in two non-consecutive terms (1993-1996 and 1988-1990). After her father, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was ousted and executed in a military coup, she and her mother Nusrat led the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy. Bhutto was leader of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP - 1982-2007), and repeatedly imprisoned by the military government, then exiled to Britain in 1984. She returned to Pakistan in 1986, and was elected as Prime Minister, but was dismissed in 1990, amidst charges and counter-charges. The rigged election ensured victory for the conservative Islamic Democratic Alliance. Bhutto served as Leader of the Opposition (1997-1999) until the new regime was dismissed on corruption charges. She went into self-exile in 1998, then returned to Pakistan in October 2007 (she survived a bombing attack on her motorcade, but 180 people were killed and 500 injured) to compete in the January 2008 election. Bhutto was killed in another attack, by gunfire and a suicide bomber, after a political rally in December 2007. The bombing killed another 24 other people in the crowd.
- June 21, 1957 – Ellen Fairclough sworn in as Canada’s first woman Cabinet Minister, Secretary of State (1957-1958); in February 1958, she briefly served as Acting Prime Minister, the first woman to have the responsibility. As Minister of Citizenship and Immigration (1958-1962), she introduced new regulations that greatly reduced racial discrimination in immigration policy, and increased the number of immigrants allowed into Canada, then served as Postmaster General (1962-1963). She was a Member of Parliament (1950-1963), advocating for women's rights, including equal pay for equal work, but was defeated in her 1963 bid for re-election. Fairclough was active in the Consumers Association of Canada and the YWCA. In 1979, named an Officer of the Order of Canada, then promoted to Companion in 1994. Her book, Saturday's Child: Memoirs of Canada's First Female Cabinet Minister, was published in 1995.
- June 21, 1960 – Kate Brown born in Spain, where her father was serving in the U.S. Air Force; Democratic politician; incumbent Governor of Oregon since 2015; Oregon Secretary of State (2009-2015); Oregon 21st district state Senator (1997-2009); Oregon state House of Representatives member for the 13th district (1991-1997). Brown has a BA in Environmental Conservation, a certificate in Women’s Studies from the University of Colorado at Boulder (1981), and a J.D. degree and certificate in Environmental Law from the Northwestern School of Law at Lewis and Clark College (1985). Noted for her rigorous performance audits to help balance the state’s budget, and signing of a “motor voter” bill to automatically register voters using driver’s license data. During her tenure as Secretary of State, Oregon became the first U.S. jurisdiction to use iPad and tablet technology to help voters with disabilities mark their ballots.
- June 21, 1965 – Lana Wachowski born as Lawrence, with sibling Lily (also a trans woman, formerly Andrew), a writing and film directing team, creators of The Matrix films, Cloud Atlas, and Jupiter Ascending.
- June 21, 1967 – Carrie Preston born, American actress, producer, and director; best known for her Emmy-award-winning portrayal of Elsbeth Tasconi on the TV seriesThe Good Wife, and in the spin-off series The Good Fight, and as Arlene Fowler on True Blood. She is the co-owner/producer of the production company Daisy 3 Pictures.
- June 21, 1973 – Zuzana Čaputová born, Slovak politician, lawyer, and activist; President of Slovakia as of June 15, 2019. Čaputová is the first woman, and at age 45 the youngest, President of Slovakia. She worked in Perzinok city government, her hometown, and was leader of a successful decade-long legal battle and community campaign against authorization of a toxic landfill in Perzinok, for which she was awarded the 2016 Goldman Environmental Prize.
- June 21, 1974 – Natasha Desborough born, British radio presenter, producer, and author. Began her media career in the 1990s as programme controller for Crystal Palace’s radio station, Palace Radio 1278AM, producing, scripting, and coordinating programming. In 2003, she hosted Xfm London’s late night Chill Out Room, then was co-presenter of Breakfast Session. Author of Parental Advisory Manual, Weirdos Vs Quimboids, and Weirdos Vs Bumskulls.
- June 21, 1987 – Khatia Buniastishvili born in the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic; Georgian-French concert pianist. She made her international debut at age 10. She is known for her performances of Liszt and Chopin.
- June 21, 2001 – Mexican artist Frida Kahlo becomes the first Hispanic woman to be honored on a U.S. postage stamp.
- June 21, 2019 – The International Labour Organization (ILO)adopted a new convention and recommendation to combat violence and harassment at work. The Violence and Harassment Convention and Violence and Harassment Recommendation recognizes that violence and harassment at work are human rights violations and threaten equal opportunities. The Convention recognizes that violence and harassment in the workplace “can constitute a human rights violation or abuse ... is a threat to equal opportunities, is unacceptable and incompatible with decent work.” It defines “violence and harassment” as behaviours, practices or threats “that aim at, result in, or are likely to result in physical, psychological, sexual or economic harm.” It reminds member States they have a responsibility to promote a “general environment of zero tolerance.” The new international labour standard aims to protect workers and employees, irrespective of their contractual status, and includes persons in training, interns, and apprentices, workers whose employment has been terminated, volunteers, job seekers, and job applicants. It recognizes that “individuals exercising the authority, duties or responsibilities of an employer” can also be subjected to violence and harassment.
- June 21, 2019 – In a New York magazine cover story, writer E. Jean Carroll tells of encountering Trump in Bergdorf Goodman’s Manhattan store sometime in late 1995 or early 1996. She had recently started an advice column for Elle magazine called “Ask E Jean.” Trump was married to Marla Maples at the time. Carroll alleges that Trump assaulted her in a store dressing room after he had asked her for advice on a present to buy a female friend. He selected a “lacy see-through bodysuit of lilac gray” and asked her to model it for him; she quipped back that he should try it on. When they reached the dressing room, Carroll alleges that Trump lunged at her and over the next three minutes sexually assaulted her. “He seizes both my arms and pushes me up against the wall a second time, and, as I become aware of how large he is, he holds me against the wall with his shoulder and jams his hand under my coat dress and pulls down my tights,” she writes. In a “colossal struggle” he unzipped his trousers and forced his fingers around her genitals and thrusting his penis “halfway – or completely, I’m not certain – inside me.” She managed to force him off her, Carroll alleges, open the door of the dressing room and flee. Trump’s response was that he “never met this person in my life.” A photograph was found of an event where they are standing near each other in a group. She filed a defamation suit against him, saying Trump, “ridiculed my reputation, laughed at my looks, & dragged me through the mud.” In February, 2020, Carroll was fired from the position she had held at Elle magazine for 36 years. Carroll says she was fired because Trump smeared her professional reputation.
- June 21, 2020 – Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (Democrat-California) said that Americans are owed answers about Donald Trump's claim that robust testing for Covid-19 turns up too many cases, which he made during his rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, saying, “When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down, please.’ They test and they test.” Pelosi called for answers from White House coronavirus task force members expected to testify in front of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on June 23. “The American people are owed answers about why President Trump wants less testing when experts say much more is needed,” she said in a statement. A Biden campaign statement responded, “This virus has killed nearly 120,000 Americans and cost tens of millions their jobs, in large part because this president could not and would not mobilize testing as quickly as we needed it. To hear him say tonight that he has ordered testing slowed — a transparent attempt to make the numbers look better — is appalling.”
- June 21, 2021 – In France, Valérie Bacot’s trial for murdering her husband began. He was previously her stepfather. She admitted to shooting him. She testified that Daniel “Dany” Polette made her life hell from the day he raped her when she was 12, to the day he died 24 years later while prostituting her. She had four children with her alleged abuser, and said she was convinced he would kill them all. She said everyone knew he was a violent sexual predator, but even after her children went to the police – twice – to report the abuse, they were told to tell their terrified mother to come in herself. France has one of the highest rates of femicide in Europe. In the same week as her trial began, three women were killed by former partners, and at least 55 other French women had been killed by current or ex partners by June of 2021. Polette pimped his wife in the back of his car that he fitted with a mattress, while spying on her with clients and giving her instructions via an earpiece. He had a pistol just in case a client turned nasty. If Bacot didn’t do what he demanded, he beat her, she told investigators. On March 13, 2016, after she was raped by a client, she took the pistol that her husband had hidden between the car seats and shot him in the head. She was sentenced to four years in prison, with three years suspended. Since she had already been in pre-trial detention for a year, she was free to return home. Three of her children were tried for helping to hide the body, and given six month suspended sentences.
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- June 22, 1427 – Lucrezia Tornabuoni born, Italian political advisor to her husband Piero Cosimo de’ Medici and her son, Lorenzo ‘the Magnificent,’ during their de facto rule of Florence and the Florentine Republic. She supported convents, widows, orphans, and was a patron of the arts, especially poets. She also wrote religious stories, plays, and poetry.
- June 22, 1450 – Eleanor of Naples born, Duchess of Ferrara (1471-1493) by marriage to Ercole d’Este; she served as regent (1482-1484) while her husband was at war with the Republic of Venice. Known for her subtle but effective handling of politics, sage counsel, and common sense. She was also a patron of the Arts, and several authors dedicated their books to her.
- June 22, 1813 – Laura Secord sets out to walk 20 miles to warn Canadian troops of an impending attack by the Americans during the War of 1812.
- June 22, 1844 – Harriett Stone Lothrop born, used pseudonym Margaret Sidney, American author of the Five Little Peppers series.
- June 22, 1865 – ‘Minnie’ Evangeline Jordon born, American dentist; opened her practice in Los Angeles after graduating from the University of California Berkeley’s school of dentistry. In 1909, she became the first U.S. dentist to specialize in pediatric dentistry, and gave lectures on the importance of childhood development of teeth to overall health. She was a founder and first president of the Federation of American Women Dentists, and a founder of the American Society of Dentistry for Children. She also wrote the first textbook on periodontics in 1925, Operative Dentistry for Children.
- June 22, 1869 – Caroline O’Day born, American politician, third woman and first female Democrat elected to Congress from New York (1935-1943); co-sponsor of Wagner-O’Day Act, predating the expanded Javits-Wagner-O’Day Act, requiring all federal agencies to purchase specified supplies and services from nonprofit agencies employing people with significant disabilities, such as blindness; since 2006 called AbilityOne.
- June 22, 1879 – Eva Germaine Rimington Taylor born, English geographer, historian of science, and author; the first woman to hold an academic chair of geography in the UK.
- June 22, 1906 – Anne Morrow Lindbergh born, American author of fiction and non-fiction; noted for Gift from the Sea; married to aviator Charles Lindbergh; in 1930, she was the first American woman to earn a first-class glider pilot’s license. From the mid-1930s up until Pearl Harbor, the Lindberghs both advocated American isolationism and made some pro-Hitler statements which tarnished their images. Anne Lindbergh began to redeem herself through her writing in the 1950s, especially with the publication of Gift from the Sea in 1955, which became a national bestseller.
- June 22, 1909 – Katherine Dunham born, American dancer, choreographer, author, educator, and activist, called “matriarch and queen mother of black dance.” Directed the Katherine Dunham Dance Company for almost 30 years.
- June 22, 1914 – Mei Zhi born, Chinese author and essayist; joined the League of Left-Wing Writers in Shanghai in 1932; she and her husband Hu Fen were arrested in 1955 for “counter-revolutionary activities.” Her “crime” was that she had transcribed one of her husband’s books. She was in prison until 1961. Her husband wasn’t released in 1965, and they both remained under surveillance by the Public Security Department. At the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, they were sent to a prison camp that produced tea. Hu was imprisoned, fell ill, and she was taken to the prison to nurse him. In 1979, Mei was “rehabilitated” and then given permission to take Hu to Beijing for treatment of his increasing mental illness, where he died in 1985. She wrote memoirs of his imprisonment, and published collections of children’s stories. Zhi joined the China Writer’s Association in 1982, which offered some protection of writer’s rights, but also enforced “acceptable literary norms.”
- June 22, 1918 – Dame Cicely Saunders born, English nurse, social worker, physician, and writer; played a major role in the birth of the Hospice movement, highlighting palliative care, especially pain management; founded a charity to promote research in improving the care and treatment of patients with progressive illnesses.
- June 22, 1921 – Barbara Vucanovich born, American politician, first woman to represent Nevada in U. S. House of Representatives (Republican-Nevada, 1983-1997), advocate for breast-cancer awareness.
- June 22, 1929 – Rose Kushner born, journalist and medical writer; challenged the wide-spread practice in the 1970s of performing a tumor biopsy and a radical mastectomy as one surgery while the patient was under anesthesia. After her own experience with breast cancer, and her struggle to find a doctor who would listen to her concerns, she wrote Breast Cancer: A Personal History and Investigative Report in 1975, a ground-breaking book which made extensive medical information and advice available to patients, and included strong criticism of combining the biopsy and radical mastectomy surgery as a single procedure. The book was strongly endorsed by Dr. Thomas Dao, the surgeon who had performed the modified radical mastectomy on Kushner, after a separate biopsy had determined her tumor was cancerous. With Dorothy Johnson, Kushner established the Breast Cancer Advisory Center, a telephone hotline to provide patients with information on breast cancer and their options. Kushner persisted, in spite of strong push-back from the medical establishment, and began to influence both public and official opinion. In 1977, she was the only non-medical professional appointed to the ten-member National Institutes of Health panel which evaluated treatment options for primary breast cancer. In 1979, the panel issued its conclusion that the Halsted radical mastectomy should no longer be the standard treatment for suspected cases of breast cancer, instead recommending total simple mastectomy as the primary surgical treatment. Kushner also convinced the panel to include a statement calling for an end to the one-step surgical procedure. Dr. Bruce Chabner of the National Cancer Institute said she was “probably the single most important person” in ending the practice of one-step surgery for breast cancer, because of her persistence and because she brought medical information to a wide public audience that otherwise was unaware of their options. She died at age 61 of breast cancer in 1990.
- June 22, 1933 – Dianne Feinstein born, American politician, San Francisco’s first woman Mayor (1978-1988); U. S. Senator (Democrat-California, 1992 to present); first woman to chair the Senate Rules Committee (2007–2009) and the Select Committee on Intelligence (2009- 2015).
- June 22, 1939 – Ada E. Yonath born, Israeli scientist and crystallographer; pioneering work on structure of the ribosome was rewarded by a 2009 Nobel Prize for Chemistry shared with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A. Steitz; director of Center for Biomolecular Structure at the Weizmann Institute of Science.
- June 22, 1940 – Joan Busfield born, British sociologist, psychologist, and author; President of the British Sociological Association (2003-2005); noted for research on mental disorders; Managing madness: changing ideas and practice, Men, women, and madness: understanding gender and mental disorder, and Mental Illness.
- June 22, 1940 – Dame Esther Rantzen born, English journalist and presenter of That’s Life! (1973-1994); founder of the child protection charity ChildLine in 1986, and The Silver Line, to combat loneliness, in 2012.
- June 22, 1941 – Terttu Savola born, Finnish Politician, chair of the For the Poor party. Member of the Espoo city council since 2008), she was her party’s first member to win a council seat. She is an ambassador for human rights and children’s rights in the Finnish UN alliance, and a lecturer for the Finnish Refuge Help Association. Savola is also the editor of the Plari newspaper published by the Southern Ostrobothnians (a regional group) in Helsinki.
- June 22, 1946 – Sheila Hollins born, Baroness Hollins, British professor of psychiatry of learning disability; Royal College of Psychiatrists president (2005-2008); crossbench Life Peer in the House of Lords since 2010; President of the British Medical Association (2012-2013).
- June 22, 1946 – Linda Bond born, Canadian officer of the Salvation Army (1969-2013); she served as 19th General of the Salvation Army (2011-2013).
- June 22, 1947 – Octavia E. Butler born, African American science fiction author; multiple winner of Hugo and Nebula awards. Noted for Kindred; Parable of the Talents; Bloodchild; and Speech Sounds. Butler died at age 58 in 2006 of a stroke, and she was posthumously inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2010.
- June 22, 1949 – Meryl Streep born, American actress, nominated for a record 21 Academy Awards, and winner of three Oscars; known for supporting liberal political causes and gender equality.
- June 22, 1949 – Elizabeth Warren born, American Democratic politician; U.S Senator from Massachusetts since 2013; FDIC Advisory Committee on Economic Inclusion (2006-2010); Law School professor whose research and analysis established her expertise in bankruptcy and commercial law; among other universities, she taught at Harvard Law School (1992 and 1995-2011).
- June 22, 1953 – Cyndi Lauper born, American singer-songwriter and LGBTQ activist; in 2012, she started True Colors United to address youth homelessness because up to 40% of American youth who identify as LGBT end up homeless. The True Colors Residence in New York City offers temporary shelter and job placement assistance.
- June 22, 1955 – Christine Orengo born, British Professor of Bioinformatics at University College London; worked on protein structure, particularly the CATH (Protein Structure Classification) database. Earned a Chemical Physics degree at the University of Bristol, then went on to study Medical Physics, and awarded a Master of Science degree (1977) for research on disruption of iron metabolism in laboratory rats with Yoshida sarcomas. Earned a Ph.D. (1984) for research on the redox (a chemical reaction) properties of ions in proteins. She was a researcher at the National Institute for Medical Research until 1990. Joined the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at University College London in 1995, and was awarded a Medical Research Council (MRC) Senior Fellowship in Bioinformatics. Promoted to Professor of Bioinformatics in 2002.
- June 22, 1964 – Amy Brenneman born, American actress, writer, and producer; best known for the television drama Judging Amy (1999-2005). She is pro-choice, and was one of the 5,000 who signed the “We Had Abortions” petition in the October 2006 issue of Ms. Magazine. She is also a strong supporter of more restrictive gun laws, hosting the 2009 Target for a Safe America gala in Los Angeles for the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
- June 22, 1968 – Miri Yu born in Yokohama, Zainichi Korean playwright, novelist, and essayist. Zainichi Koreans are Korean naturalized citizens of Japan who immigrated to Japan before 1945, or are the descendants of those immigrants. She writes in Japanese, her first language, but is a citizen of South Korea.
- June 22, 1972 – Wangechi Mutu born in Kenya, Kenyan-American artist and sculptor, who lives and works in New York. Noted for combining themes of gender, race, and personal identity in her work. She creates complex collages, sculpture, videos, and performance art.
- June 22, 1974 – Jo Cox born, British Labour Member of Parliament (2015-2016); she was just a few days short of her 42nd birthday when she was assassinated on June 16, 2016, by a far-right extremist who shot and stabbed her as she was arriving for a meeting with constituents. Cox was a supporter of women’s and human rights, aid to refugees from war in the Middle East, a campaigner for resolution of the Syrian Civil War, and an advocate for Britain to remain in the European Union. She worked for Oxfam (2001-2015), rising to head of policy and advocacy at Oxfam GB, before entering politics.
- June 22, 1980 – Pope John Paul II beatified Kateri Tekakwitha, a Mohawk woman (1656-1680) living in the Albany area and later near Montreal; first Native American beatified by the Roman Catholic Church. Left an orphan by a smallpox epidemic that killed the rest of her family (and scarred her face) she grew up in contact with Jesuit missionaries and was baptized at age 19. Her spirituality and early death led to her reputation growing among Catholics.
- June 22, 2019 – Academics from University College London, and specialist staff from King’s College Hospital NHS trust, working with three London area sexual assault centres, have published in The Lancet Child and Adolescent Health medical journal results of a study of 137 girls ages 13 to 17 who were victims of sexual attack between April 2013 and April 2015. Their findings confirm that abuse in childhood and adolescence can lead to crippling mental health issues that persist into adulthood. When the girls were examined four to five months after being attacked, 80% of them had at least one mental health disorder and 55% had at least two disorders. 4% of the girls had become pregnant, 12% had a sexually transmitted infection, and 8% – one in 12 – had been the subject of more than one sexual assault.
- June 22, 2020 – Authors Ugla Stefanía Kristjönudóttir Jónsdóttir, Fox Fisher, Drew Davies, and a fourth unnamed author, formerly represented by the Blair Partnership, which is J.K. Rowling’s literary agency, resigned after accusing Blair of declining to issue a public statement supporting transgender rights. Jónsdóttir, Fisher, and Davies, in a statement after private talks with the agency, said, “We felt that they were unable to commit to any action that we thought was appropriate and meaningful ... Freedom of speech can only be upheld if the structural inequalities that hinder equal opportunities for underrepresented groups are challenged and changed.” A Blair spokeswoman said the agency would always champion diverse voices and believe in freedom of speech for all but it was not willing to have staff “re-educated” to meet demands by a small group of clients. Jónsdóttir, co-author of Trans Teen Survival Guide, said, “We tried speaking with them internally before going public. We felt like we had to speak out about it. As trans people it’s just a matter of values ... We don’t want to be associated with an agency that doesn’t value the same things that we do.”
- June 22, 2021 – Karona Gould, Canada’s Minister of International Development, also represents her country at the Generation Equality Forum Action Coalition on Feminist Movements and Leadership. She says the Government of Canada signed up for a leadership role “because Feminist organizations are on the frontlines in their communities as we have seen throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. They have been supporting the poorest and most vulnerable, fighting and advocating to ensure that those dependent on services, such as women’s shelters, continue to have access. These are the people on the ground who are making change happen on a day-to-day basis, and we must support them … we see challenges and barriers to feminist movements and leadership that we want to help mitigate … A big challenge is funding. Less than 1 per cent of all gender-focused aid goes towards feminist organizations – we simply need more. Another serious challenge is the pushback against gender equality around the world. This makes supporting civil society and developing allyship and solidarity across countries even more important. The Action Coalition agenda is critical to ensure that we tackle these barriers and see real gains and progress … Canada has invested CAD 300 million in the Equality Fund, which is a unique partnership between civil society, philanthropy and the private sector, providing long-term sustainable funding to women’s rights and feminist organizations around the world … What is so exciting about the Generation Equality Forum is that it’s not just a three-day conference, it’s a five-year agenda that asks us to actually commit and take action to achieve gender equality.”
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- June 23, 1456 – Margaret of Denmark born, Queen consort of Scotland (1469-1486), by marriage to King James III; their betrothal ended a feud between Denmark and Scotland over Scotland’s arrears in taxes owed to Denmark for the Hebrides and Isle of Man. The Scottish debt was cancelled upon their marriage in 1469, when she was only 13 years old, and James was 17 or 18.. As Queen, Margaret was given the largest jointure (provision for a wife upon the death of husband) allowed by Scottish law in her marriage settlement. She was an early fashionista, but became popular in Scotland, widely regarded as beautiful, gentle, sensible, and intelligent. Some historians thought her far better qualified to rule than her husband, who tried to form alliances with the wrong factions at the wrong times, and showed marked favoritism to lesser members of the court, alienating more powerful nobles. Her marriage to James III was not a happy one, in part because she found him unattractive, but also because he favored their second son, confusingly also named James, over their eldest son, James IV. James III’s machinations to wrest the Earldom of Ross from John MacDonald to bestow it on his favorite son, even accusing MacDonald of treason, created the crisis of 1482, compounded by an English invasion. The King was arrested by his disaffected nobles, imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle, and deprived of his power for several months, until freed by his uncles. Although politically Margaret worked for his reinstatement, she showed far greater interest in their three sons’ welfare than his, causing a permanent estrangement. After James was reinstated, he lived in Edinburgh, while Margaret lived in Stirling Castle with her sons. Margaret didn’t live long enough to make use of her jointure. She fell ill and died in 1486, at the age of 30. There were unsubstantiated rumors that she had been poisoned. James III was killed in 1488, at the Battle of Sauchieburn, won by his still disaffected and rebellious nobles, who were championing the heir, James IV, who was their somewhat reluctant “guest.”
- June 23, 1763 – Joséphine (Tascher de la Pagerie) de Beauharnais born, first wife of Napoléon Bonaparte, and Empress of the French (1804-1810) until Napoléon divorced her to marry a princess who could give birth to an heir. Joséphine’s first husband, Alexandre, Viscount de Beauharnais, was guillotined during the Reign of Terror. A noted patron of the Arts, especially painters, sculptors, and designers, she also collected roses from all over the world for her garden at Château de Malmaison. Her daughter with Alexandre, Hortense de Beauharnais, became Queen consort of Holland, and the mother of Napoléon III.
- June 23, 1826 – Anne McDowell born, American editor, journalist, pioneering advocate for working women’s rights; founder and publisher of the Woman’s Advocate (1855-1860), the first weekly U.S. newspaper staffed completely by women, including typesetters and printers, and written by and for women. The paper’s stated goal was “the elevation of the female industrial class.” McDowell wasn’t concerned with woman’s suffrage, but instead fought for education, more employment opportunities, and equal pay. She put her principles into action, by paying her employees the same wages that men in their jobs earned. When the Advocate went out of business in 1860 because costs were increasing faster than the number of its subscribers, McDowell became editor of the women’s department of the Philadelphia Sunday Dispatch (1860-1871), one of the few women department heads in the newspaper field at the time. She left the Dispatch to become editor of the Philadelphia Sunday Republic. She was also active in labor issues, founding an organization in 1884 to secure sickness and death benefits for employees of Wanamaker’s department store, and establishing the McDowell Free Library for Wanamaker’s women employees. She died in 1901.
- June 23, 1879 – Huda Sha’arawi born, pioneering Egyptian feminist leader and nationalist; secluded in a harem as a child, at thirteen she was given in marriage to her cousin, but they separated, and she learned from women teachers to read the Quran, and study Islamic subjects. She wrote poetry in Arabic and French. Sha’arawi resented the restriction of women to the house or harem, and organized lectures for women-only audiences. Many of the women from wealthy families who attended were in a public place for the first time in their lives. Sha’arawi raised money to help poor Egyptian women, and founded a school for girls, emphasizing academic subjects. After WWI, she helped organize the largest demonstration by Egyptian women against British rule. After Sha’awarwi stopped wearing the veil in public after her husband’s death in 1922, most of the women in Egypt were following her example by the 1930s. she co-foundedMubarrat Muhammad Ali, a women’s social service organization in 1909, and the Union of Educated Egyptian Women in 1914. In 1923, she founded and was the first president of the Egyptian Feminist Union, publishing the feminist magazine L’Egyptienne.
- June 23, 1889 – Anna Akhmatova born, pseudonym for Russian poet Anna Andreyevna Gorenko, one of the most acclaimed writers in Russian literature, noted for remaining in the Soviet Union and writing about the terrors of living under Stalinism.
- June 23, 1889 – Verena Holmes born, English mechanical engineer and inventor, specializing in marine and locomotive engines, both diesel and internal combustion engines. In 1924, she was the first woman elected to the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (but wasn’t made a full member until the 1940s), and an associate member of the Institution of Marine Engineers. A strong supporter of women in engineering, she was an early member of the Women’s Engineering Society, and the society’s president in 1931, the same year she was admitted to the Institution of Locomotive Engineers. Her patents include the Holmes and Wingfield pneumo-thorax apparatus for treating patients with tuberculosis, a surgeon's headlamp, a poppet valve for steam locomotives, and rotary valves for internal combustion engines, and several other patents for medical devices and engine components. During WWII, she worked on naval weaponry and trained women for munitions work, serving as headquarters technical officer with the Ministry of Labour (1940-1944). In 1946, she founded the firm of Holmes and Leather, which employed only women, and published a booklet, Training and Opportunities for Women in Engineering. International Women in Engineering Day was set on her birthday.
- June 23, 1898 – Winifred Holtby born, English novelist, poet, and journalist. Also an ardent feminist, socialist, and pacifist. Holtby was a prolific writer for over 20 newspapers and magazines, including the Manchester Guardian, and the feminist journal Time and Tide (she also served on the journal’s board). Now best remembered for her novel, South Riding, published in 1936, the year after her death at age 37 from kidney disease.
- June 23, 1900 – Blanche W. Noyes born, American pioneering woman aviator, one of the first 10 women to earn a pilot’s license (1929). Two months after she got her license, she was one of 20 competitors in the inaugural Women’s Air Derby, flying from Santa Monica CA to Cleveland OH; her plane caught fire in mid-air near Pecos TX, and she damaged her landing gear when she set down, but put out the fire, made repairs, and continued to race, coming in fourth in the heavy class. In 1936, the first year women were allowed to compete against men, she was co-pilot to Louise Thaden, and they won the Bendix Trophy Race, setting a world record of 14 hours, 55 minutes flying from New York City to Los Angeles CA in a Beechwood C17R Staggerwing plane. In 1936, she was part of a team of women pilots working on a WPA project to aid aerial navigation by painting the name of the nearest town at 15-mile intervals on prominent buildings or clear ground, but with the U.S. entry into WWII in 1941, they had to black out the roughly 13,000 sites they had marked. After the war, she was head of the air marking division of the Civil Aeronautics Administration, overseeing restoring and adding navigational aids, the only woman for several years allowed to fly a government plane.
- June 23, 1915 – Frances Gabe born, American artist and inventor, noted for designing and building the ‘Self-Cleaning House.’ She was granted a patent for the overall concept, and 25 additional patents for individual inventions she incorporated into the design; Erma Bombeck jestingly declared in her column that Gabe’s likeness should be added to Mount Rushmore.
- June 23, 1918 – Madeleine Parent born, Canadian labour leader and feminist, advocate for aboriginal rights, known for work in establishing the Canadian Textile and Chemical Union and the Confederation of Canadian Unions.
- June 23, 1921 – Jeanne M. Holm born, the first woman promoted to Major General (1973) in the U.S. Air Force.
- June 23, 1923 – Doris Johnson born, American Democratic politician; Washington state House of Representatives member, 8th district (1973-1975); Washington state House of Representatives member, 16th district (1971-1973).
- June 23, 1923 – Giuseppina Tuissi born, Italian communist and WWII partisan, part of the 52nd Brigata Garibaldi “Luigi Clerici.” Worked with ‘Captain Neri’ (Luigi Canali). Arrested and tortured during interrogation by the Gestapo in January 1945, but released in March. Both she and ‘Neri’ were there for the arrest and execution of Benito Mussolini in April. She was accused by a regional commander of the Garibaldi Brigades of revealing names of partisans during torture, was detained, and told that Luigi Canali had been executed by a partisan tribunal, but she was released. She went to Milan in May 1945, with Canali’s sister, to find out more about Luigi’s death. Unable to get answers to her questions, she continued to investigate, even after she was threatened. She disappeared on June 23, 1945, her 22nd birthday. Her presumed murder is still unsolved.
- June 23, 1926 – Magda Herzberger born, Romanian Jewish author, poet, composer, and Holocaust survivor, noted for her autobiography, Survival, and her composition, Requiem, in honor of the victims of the Holocaust.
- June 23, 1926 – Annette Mbaye d’Erneville born, Senegalese writer, poet, teacher, and radio programme director for Radio Senegal. As a journalist, she specialized in women’s issues, and launched Awa magazine in 1963, the first francophone publication for African women. She writes children’s literature and poetry. Noted for Poèmes africains, and La Bague de cuivre et d'argent (The Copper and Silver Ring), which won prix Jeune Afrique in 1961.
- June 23, 1930 – Marie-Thérèse Houphouët-Boigny born, First Lady of Côte d'Ivoire (1962-1993), and philanthropist; in 1987, she founded the N’Daya International Foundation, dedicated to improving the health, welfare, and education of the children of Africa. In 1990, she helped create and produce a cartoon, Kimboo, to offer cartoon heroes for African children.
- June 23, 1940 – Wilma Rudolph born, African American sprinter, Olympic world-record-holder, and track and field icon. She won three gold medals and a bronze in two different Olympics, the 1956 Melbourne games and the 1960 games in Rome. Because of intense coverage of the Summer Olympics, she became one of the highest-profile black women in the world, elevating women’s track and field in America, and becoming a role model for African American women and Olympic women athletes. She was a pioneer in civil rights and women’s rights. In 1962, she retired from participation in sports, and became a teacher and a coach. She died from cancer in 1994.
- June 23, 1943 – Ellyn Kaschak born, American clinical psychologist, a founder of the field of feminist psychology; author of Engendered Lives: A New Psychology of Women’s Experience, and editor of the academic journal, Women & Therapy. Honored with the 2004 Distinguished Leadership Award by the Committee on Women in Psychology of the American Psychological Association.
- June 23, 1951 – Michèle Mouton born, French rally driver who competed in the World Rally Championship for the Audi factory team, winning four victories. She was runner-up in the Drivers’ World Championship in 1982; first woman president of the Women and Motor Sport Commission of the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA). Mouton was inducted into the Rally Hall of Fame in 2012.
- June 23, 1957 – Frances McDormand born, American actress who has achieved two distinctions: she has won two Academy Awards, two Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Tony Award, making her one of the few performers to have won the “Triple Crown” of acting. She is also one of the few women to have played God, in the 2019 television miniseries Good Omens, based on the novel by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.
- June 23, 1960 – The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approves use of Searle’s combined oral contraceptive pill, Enovid, for use as a contraceptive. It was previously approved for treatment of menstrual disorders in 1957.
- June 23, 1965 – Sylvia Mathews Burwell born, American government and non-profit executive; first woman President of American University in Washington DC, since 2017; U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (2014-2017); Director of the Office of Management and Budget (2013-2o14); Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget (1998-2001); White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy (1997-1998). She has also worked for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Wal-Mart Foundation.
- June 23, 1972 – 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. Title IX guarantees equal access and equal opportunity in education: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”
- June 23, 1980 – Becky Cloonan born, American comic book creator; noted as the first woman to draw the main Batman title for DC Comics.
- June 23, 2005 – International Widows Day launched by the Loomba Foundation to raise awareness of the plight of widows. Women are more likely to outlive their spouses, but are less likely to remarry than men. There are an estimated 245 million widows worldwide, and at least 115 million of them live in poverty, suffering social stigma and economic deprivation purely because they have lost their husbands. In 2010, the UN General Assembly formally adopted June 23 as International Widows Day.
- June 23, 2013 – The first International Women in Engineering Day. In 2019, the 100th Anniversary of the Women's Engineering Society was also being celebrated in the UK.
- June 23, 2018 – Donald Trump spoke at a campaign rally for Senator Dean Heller (Republican-Nevada) in Las Vegas, urging his audience to vote against Heller’s opponent, Representative Jacky Rosen (Democrat-Nevada), whom Trump called “Wacky Jacky.” A “vote for her is a vote for increased taxes,” Trump claimed. “Weak borders. It is really a vote for crime.” Trump also weighed in on key current issues for his administration, positing that trade relations will “work out” somehow “because, you know, we’re the piggy bank that everybody likes to rob from.” On immigration, Trump argued his administration is doing “a very good job.” Jacky Rosen, who was endorsed by Barack Obama and Joe Biden, defeated Dean Heller, the only challenger in the 2018 election to defeat a Republican incumbent U.S. Senator.
- June 23, 2019 – Emily Eavis, Glastonbury Festival organiser, says some men in the music industry still refuse to deal with her despite her taking over responsibility from her father for overseeing the lineup. Speaking days before the start of the 2019 event, Eavis, 40, who has been booking acts at Glastonbury for half her life, said she’s often the only woman in meetings with music moguls. Some male executives insisted on speaking to her father, Michael Eavis, 83, who co-created the festival at the family’s Worthy Farm in Somerset. “The live music world has been so male-dominated,”she told BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. “I go to meetings with just tables of men. Some were great, and some just refuse to accept that they had to deal with me.” Eavis reaffirmed her aim of creating an equal gender balance of performers, after the Guardian revealed in 2015 that the lineup then was 86% male. “We are working toward 50/50. Some years it’s 60/40. It’s a challenge for us and we’ve really taken it on and I’m always totally conscious every day that the gender balance should be right.” Glastonbury, a five-day festival, started as the Pilton Festival in 1970. Glastonbury Festivals Ltd donates most of their profits to charities, including donations to local charity and community groups and paying for the purchase and restoration of the 14th century Tithe Barn in Pilton. The 2020 festival was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
- June 23, 2020 – Donald Trump’s family asked a New York judge to block publication of a book by his niece, Mary Trump. Her tell-all book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man, was due to be published July 28 by Simon & Schuster. The publisher said the book by the daughter of Trump's late brother, Fred Trump Jr., provides a revealing portrait of her uncle "and the toxic family that made him." Donald Trump's younger brother, Robert Trump, requested a temporary restraining order, saying his niece was violating a nondisclosure agreement signed to settle the estate of his father, Fred Trump Sr. The lawyer for Mary Trump said the family was violating the First Amendment by trying to "suppress" an important book. The judge rejected the Trump family’s attempt to stop publication on jurisdictional grounds. On appeal, a State Supreme Court judge on July 13 denied an injunction against publication, saying the nondisclosure agreement signed by Mary Trump when her grandfather’s estate was settled should have had “more clarity.” He also cited the "potential enormous cost and logistical nightmare" in stopping the publication and recalling hundreds of thousands of books, and referenced the ruling in a lawsuit to stop the publication of John Bolton's tell-all, The Room Where It Happened, quoting, "By the looks of it the horse is not just out of the barn, it is out of the country.”
- June 23, 2021 – The Royal Academy of Arts in London apologised to Jess de Walhs, an embroidery artist, for removing her work from its gift shop after it had branded her views as transphobic on social media, calling its initial decision a “betrayal” of its commitment to freedom of speech. The Academy said it had mishandled the situation and that its internal communications had failed, which led to De Wahls hearing about the work being pulled via social media. The controversy arose over De Wahl’s 2019 comments on her website, “I have no issue with somebody who feels more comfortable expressing themselves as if they are the other sex (or in whatever way they please for that matter). However, I cannot accept people’s unsubstantiated assertions that they are in fact the opposite sex to when they were born and deserve to be extended the same rights as if they were born as such.” When the post was flagged, De Wahls’s embroidery work was removed from the Royal Academy gift shop, with the artist saying she was contacted by officials at organisation who told her they were investigating. The Royal Academy posted a message on Instagram saying: “Thank you to all those for bringing an item in the RA shop by an artist expressing transphobic views to our attention.” LGBT rights campaigner Peter Tatchell responded in a Guardian interview: “Trans women are different from other women, but being a different kind of woman is perfectly valid and no justification for the denial of their identity. If an artist denied Jewish, black or gay people’s identity, most people would say that the Royal Academy would be right to remove their works from the gift shop. But when Jess denies trans people’s identity, she and other trans critics say that it’s her right to free speech and she should not be penalised. This smacks of double standards.”
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Laysan Albatross Lesbians
31% of female Laysan albatrosses on the Hawaiian island of Oahu pair off with other females. Like male-female pairs, they raise a single chick between them and are faithful for several years. Some female pairs bond for life.
This large seabird ranges across the Northern Pacific, but the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands are home base to 99.7% of the population. It is the second-most common seabird in the Hawaiian Islands.
Laysan albatrosses are considered vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).