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 1 through June 8.
The next WOW2 edition will post
on Saturday, June 11, 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
In 2000, President Clinton proclaimed the first “Gay and Lesbian Pride Month,” to commemorate the uprising on June 28, 1969, at NYC’s Stonewall Inn that became the catalyst for the modern LGTBQ+ civil rights movement in America. In 2016, President Obama designated the Stonewall Inn and Christopher Park in Greenwich Village as the Stonewall National Monument.
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 1, 1310 – Marguerite Porète, French mystic, was burned at the stake for heresy in Paris. After a lengthy trial, she refused to recant her beliefs or remove her book, The Mirror of Simple Souls, from circulation. Condemned for her belief that in a state of contemplative love of God, the soul has no need of Masses, or intercession by priests, or even prayer. Her book was also suspect because she wrote it in Old French instead of Latin. After Porète's death, the Mirror was circulated as an anonymous work. Originally written in Old French, it was translated into Latin, Italian, and Middle English and widely circulated. Some thought that the author was the venerated Canon John of Ruusbroec. In 1946, Romana Guarnieri finally identified Latin manuscripts of the Mirror in the Vatican as the supposedly lost book of Marguerite Porète. A Middle French manuscript of the text, probably made after 1370, was published in 1965.
- June 1, 1660 – Mary Dyer, one of four Quakers known as the Boston Martyrs, is hanged after repeatedly returning to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in protest of Quakers being banned by the Puritans for their ‘heretical’ beliefs.
- June 1, 1797 – Abby Hadassah Smith born, suffragist, and women’s property rights advocate; the subject of Abby Smith and her Cows, written by her sister Julia Evelina Smith. The Town of Glastonbury raised taxes on the Smith sisters and two widows, but their male neighbors’ property assessments and taxes had not risen, so the sisters refused to pay the taxes without being granted a right to vote in town meetings. Seven of Abby’s cows were seized and sold for taxes in January, 1874. When she protested this seizure of property, 15 acres of her pastureland were also seized for delinquent taxes (June 1874). The sisters took the town to court and ultimately won their case.
- June 1, 1822 – Clementina Maude, Viscountess Hawarden, born; noted English Victorian amateur photographer who produced over 800 photographs, many of them of family members; she exhibited some of her work at the 1863 exhibition of the Photographic Society of London, for which she was awarded a medal for “artistic excellence,” and was elected as a member of the society; over 700 of her portraits were donated to the Victoria and Albert Museum.
- June 1, 1868 – Annie MacKinnon Fitch born, mathematician, earned a Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1894; her dissertation was titled “Concomitant Binary Forms in Terms of the Roots.” Cornell's Mathematics Department granted three of the first six Ph.D.'s earned by women at American institutions – Annie MacKinnon was the second recipient, after Ida Metcalf, and before Agnes Sime Baxter. She became Professor of Mathematics (1896-1901) at Wells College, and was elected to American Mathematical Society (1897). Like most other women of the day, she left teaching when she married Edward Fitch. As a member of the American Association for Advancement of Science and the League of Women Voters, she continued to encourage women to pursue higher education, and participate in local, state, and national political issues. She died in 1940 at age 72.
- June 1, 1873 – Elena Alistar-Romanescu born in Bessarabia (Eastern Europe, now part of Moldova and the Ukraine), physician, and one of only two women members of Sfatul Ţării (Moldovan governing council, 1971-1981) under the Russian Federative Republic, just before union with Romania.
- June 1, 1908 – Julie Campbell Tatham born, American author of children’s novels and books for adults, which were often about Christian Science; newspaper reporter and short story writer; noted for her Trixie Belden and Ginny Gordon series, both published under the name Julie Campbell.
- June 1 & 2, 1917 – The Salvation Army “Lassies” followed WWI American troops to Europe, volunteering to make a “home away from home” for the soldiers of the 1st Ammunition Train, 1st Division in France. Food writer and historian John T. Edge’s book, Donuts: An American Passion, tells the tale. The women set up not too far behind the lines, and often darned socks, mended uniforms, or provided chocolates to the troops. But the boys wanted more, so Ensign Margaret Sheldon and Adjutant Helen Purviance jury-rigged a method to fry doughnuts, either using a galvanized trash can or a soldier’s helmet (accounts vary) filled with lard. The women fried the treats, and doughnuts soon became popular with the troops, who would eagerly wait in line for them, which legend says is where the nickname ‘Doughboys’ came from. The inaugural National Donut Day was held in Chicago in 1938, in honor of the women. The event was also a successful fundraiser for victims of the Great Depression.
- June 1, 1925 – Dilia Díaz Cisneros born, Venezuelan poet and teacher, founder of three national public schools in Caracas: “Bogotá” (1965), “Los Jardines” (1968), and “Caracciolo Parra León” (1971).
- June 1, 1926 – Marilyn Monroe born as Norma Jean Mortenson, iconic American movie star, actress, and singer; after several box office hits, which made her a major “sex symbol,” she founded her own production company, and negotiated more control of the roles she played, most notably in Bus Stop and The Misfits. She was raised mostly in foster homes and an orphanage. Monroe struggled with substance abuse, depression, and anxiety; she died in 1962, at the age of 36, from an overdose of barbiturates.
- June 1, 1928 – Alberta Daisy Schenck Adams born, civil rights activist for equality of indigenous peoples, before Alaska statehood. Instrumental in passage of the Alaska Civil Rights Act, passed by the Territorial Legislature 10 years before the Brown vs. the Board of Education decision.
- June 1, 1929 – Nargis born as Fatima Rashid, Indian actress and Bollywood star, who became a Member of the Rajya Sabha (Indian Parliament) from 1980 until her death from pancreatic cancer in 1981. She was the first patron of the Spastic Society of India, and the Nargis Dutt Memorial Cancer Foundation was established in 1982 in her memory.
- June 1, 1934 – Doris Buchanan Smith born, American children’s author; best known for A Taste of Blackberries, an ALA Notable Children’s Book and Newberry Medal finalist, which deals honestly with childhood bereavement.
- June 1, 1937 – Colleen McCullough born, Australian author, best known for her international best-selling novel, The Thorn Birds; she was also a neuroscientist, who was a research associate and teacher in the Yale Medical School Department of Neurology (1967-1976).
- June 1, 1940 – Katerina Gogou born, Greek poet, author, and actress; her poetry is known for its rebellious anarcho-communist content. Her first poetry collection, Three Click Left, published in 1978, was translated into English in 1983 by Jack Hirschman.
- June 1, 1942 – Professor Dame Parveen Kumar born in Lahore, when it was still part of British India; British physician, Professor of Medicine and Education at Barts, and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry, Queen Mary University; President of the Royal Medical Benevolent Fund and of the Medical Women’s Federation; President of the British Medical Association in 2006; one of the founders in 1999 of the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE).
- June 1, 1943 – Kuki Gallman born in Italy, renowned conservationist, environmental activist, and author who turned a 98,000 acre (400km) cattle ranch in Kenya into Ol Ari Nyiro, a nature conservancy, and founded the Great Rift Valley Trust to bring international artists to Kenya to create original fusion art with local Kenyan artists. She became a Kenyan citizen in the 1980s. Her autobiography, I Dreamed of Africa, is her best-known book. In 2017, she was shot twice the day after her tourist lodge was burned down in an arson fire. Both incidents are believed to be the work of Pokot pastoralists who have invaded private ranches and conservancies along Laikipia’s western fringe, bringing with them livestock in the tens of thousands, poaching wildlife, stealing cattle, and intimidating landowners and workers. Ol Ari Nyiro is unique for its biodiversity, home to rare flora and fauna found only in its forest and bush.
- June 1, 1945 – Kerry Vincent born, Australian chef and cake designer; director of the Oklahoma Sugar Art Show, the largest judged sugar art show in the U.S.; author of Romantic Wedding and Celebration Cakes.
- June 1, 1945 – Frederica von Stade born, American bel canto mezzo-soprano; debuted at the Metropolitan Opera in the 1971-1972 season; the role of Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro made her an international star, and remained a signature role.
- June 1, 1958 – Jean Lambert born, English Green Party politician; Member of the European Parliament for the London Region since 1999, and recipient of the inaugural Justice and Human Rights MEP of the Year award in 2005; Green Party Principal Speaker (1998-1999); Vice President of the Waltham Forest Race Equality Council since 1999.
- June 1, 1951 – Lola Young born, Baroness Young of Hornsey, British actress, author, and Crossbench peer since 2004; published her book, Fear of the Dark: Race, Gender and Sexuality in Cinema, in 1995; Commissioner in the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts (2000-2001); head of culture at the Greater London Authority (2001-2004), for which she was created a life peer in 2004.
- June 1, 1954 – Jill Black born, Lady Black of Derwent; second woman Justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom (which was created in 2017); specialist in family law; Queen’s Counsel (1994-1996); High Court judge (1996-1999); Recorder (1999); appointed a Lady Justice of Appeal (2010-2017), and a member of the Privy Council.
- June 1, 1957 – Dorota Kędzierzawska born, Polish director of documentary and feature films; notable films include Crows; Nothing, I Am; Time to Die; and Devils, Devils which was screened at Cannes in 1991.
- June 1, 1968 – Susan Jones born, British Labour Party politician; Member of Parliament for Clwyd South since 2010, who took her Oath of Allegiance to the Queen in Welsh; advocate for the use of the Welsh language, for support of military families, and for transparency concerning all MP’s expenses – she publishes her expenses on her website every month.
- June 1, 1974 – Alanis Morissette born in Canada, Canadian-American alternative rock singer-songwriter, and record producer. Among the many awards she has won are seven Grammy Awards, three Billboard Music Awards, and a Billboard Music Icon Award.
- June 1, 1974 – Sarah Teather born, British Liberal Democrat politician, Member of Parliament (2003-2010); Minister of State for Children and Families (2010-2012); founder of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Guantanamo Bay; chair of the APPG on Refugees, their 2015 report on immigration detention found it was used excessively, and recommended a limit of 28 days for holding an individual in an immigration removal centre.
- June 1, 1981 – Amy Schumer born, stand-up comic, and the creator, co-producer, co-writer and star of the Comedy Central series, Inside Amy Schumer (2013-2016), which won a 2014 Peabody Award, and a 2015 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Variety Sketch Series. She wrote the screenplay and starred in the movie Trainwreck (2015), and published a best-selling memoir, The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo, in 2016. She often uses her comedy to address political issues like rape culture and gun control. She was arrested in Washington DC while protesting the nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court of Brett Kavanaugh, who was accused of sexual assault by Professor of Psychology Christine Blasey Ford, and of sexual misconduct by two other women.
- June 1, 1993 – Connie Chung becomes the second woman to co-anchor the evening news, 17 years after Barbara Walters became the first in 1976.
- June 1, 2015 – Ameenah Gurib-Fakim, Mauritian biodiversity scientist, is designated as the first woman president of Mauritius (2015-2018).
- June 1, 2015 – Harriette Thompson, age 92, became the oldest woman ever to finish a marathon. Thompson, a grandmother of ten from Charlotte, North Carolina, crossed the finish line of the San Diego Rock 'n' Roll Marathon in 7 hours, 24 minutes, and 36 seconds. She was met by confetti cannons at the end of the 26.2-mile race. "I can't believe I made it!" she said. "Around Mile 21, I was going up a hill and it was like a mountain, and I was thinking, 'This is sort of crazy at my age.' But then I felt better coming down the hill."
- June 1, 2020 – Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms captured the nation’s attention when she addressed the civil unrest occurring in her city after George Floyd’s death. “I am a mother to four black children in America, one of whom is 18 years old,” Bottoms said in a rousing speech. “When I saw the murder of George Floyd, I hurt like a mother.” Bottoms and other black women mayors, including Lori Lightfoot of Chicago, Muriel Bowser of Washington DC, and London Breed of San Francisco, are leading some of the nation’s largest cities during an unprecedented moment of challenge as protests against police brutality overlap with the coronavirus pandemic and an economic collapse.
- June 1, 2021 – Two new studies showed the COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna are safe and effective for pregnant women, according to Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
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- June 2, 1692 – Bridget Bishop goes on trial as the first person accused of witchcraft in the Salem witch trials; she was also the first person hanged. Bishop fell under suspicion because she operated a tavern, stayed up late, drank spirits, and wore “ostentatious” clothing, including a red bodice with colored loops in it. At her trial, a town dyer said she brought him “sundry pieces of lace” in shapes and sizes suggesting that she was a “dishonest” woman.
- June 2, 1816 – Grace Aguilar born, British novelist, poet, and author of Jewish non-fiction on history and religion: The Spirit of Judaism, The Women of Israel and History of the Jews in England, one of the first histories of the Jews living in England.
- June 2, 1838 – Duchess Alexandra of Oldenburg born to Duke Peter of Oldenburg and his wife Princess Therese of Nassau-Weilburg, noted for their philanthropy, who assured she was well educated. She spoke Russian, German, English and French, and excelled in the arts. Alexandra was also interested in medicine and solving the social problems of the poor. In 1856, she was married to Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich of Russia, the third son of Tsar Nicholas I. Alexandra was raised as a Lutheran, but had to convert to Russian Orthodoxy, and took the name Grand Duchess Alexandra Petrovna of Russia. She bore two sons, but the marriage, arranged by the Russian Imperial family to try to control the Grand Duke’s excesses, was a failure. Alexandra was plain, serious-minded, religious, and devoted to charity work. By 1865, she was founding a training institute for nurses in St. Petersburg, while her husband was starting a flagrant affair with a ballerina, and forming a second family with her. He expelled Alexandra from their household in 1879. A carriage accident left Alexandra almost completely paralyzed and, in 1880, she was compelled by her brother-in-law Tsar Alexander II, to go abroad. In 1881, her nephew, Tsar Alexander III, allowed her to return. She settled in Kiev, where she recovered her mobility. In 1889, she founded the Pokrov of Our Lady Monastery, a convent of nursing nuns with its own hospital to provide free treatment for the poor, and became an Orthodox nun. She died at the convent in 1900.
- June 2, 1861 – Concordia Hård Selander born, Swedish actress and theatrical manager. In 1889, she and her husband Hjalmar Selander were actor-managers of their renowned Selander Company, notable for quality productions on tour and a “respected repertoire” – and, above all, for good finances that assured their actors always got paid. Beginning in 1917, she also worked as an actress in films. Many of the young talents the Selanders discovered and helped to develop became famous actors in Swedish theatre and film.
- June 2, 1863 – Combahee River, South Carolina: Union troops move through the Low Country waters by steamboats, and the South Carolina militia turn out to resist. Captain Harriet Tubman (with a commission personally signed by Abraham Lincoln) leads 150 men ashore to engage and beat them back. The raiders then take 750 slaves to freedom at the Union Navy base in Beaufort, SC. This rare case of the Underground Railroad going on the offense was the only Civil War action led by a woman commanding officer. When Tubman died in 1913, by her own request, she was buried in her captain’s uniform and the US Army gave her full military honors.
- June 2, 1865 – Adelaide Casely-Hayford born, advocate for the Sierra Leone Creole identity and cultural heritage, feminist, educator and writer; she was educated in England, attended Jersey Ladies’ College, then studied music at the Stuttgart Conservatory in Germany; after 25 years abroad, she returned to Sierra Leone, and joined the Ladies Division of the Freetown branch of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, but resigned in 1920, and went on a lecture tour in America to raise funds for a vocational school for girls, which opened in 1923 with 14 pupils; she created a sensation in 1925 when she wore traditional Sierra Leone dress at a reception for the Prince of Wales.
- June 2, 1899 – Lotte Reiniger born, German animator and film director, a pioneer in silhouette animation; known for her films The Adventures of Prince Achmed and The Magic Flute.
- June 2, 1907 – Dorothy West born, American journalist and Harlem Renaissance author; most remembered for her novel, The Living is Easy.
- June 2, 1913 – Barbara Pym born, British author, Fellow of Royal Society of Literature, who wrote social comedies like Excellent Women; A Glass of Blessings; and Quartet in Autumn. Though her first books were popular, decreasing sales on several subsequent novels led to her work being rejected as too “old-fashioned.” Though Pym didn’t stop writing, she was unable to get anything published from 1962 until 1977, when the Times Literary Supplement ran an article in which high-profile literary figures listed their most underrated and overrated British novelists of the 20th century. Poet and novelist Philip Larkin and biographer Lord David Cecil both chose her as their most underrated novelist, the only author nominated twice. This revived interest in her work among publishers, and led to the publication of Quartet in Autumn, which was nominated for the 1977 Booker Prize, and the reissuing of her previously published books by her former publisher. She was also noticed and published for the first time in the U.S. But in January 1980, she died at age 66 from a recurrence of breast cancer. Her last completed novel, A Few Green Leaves, was published posthumously.
- June 2, 1913 – Elsie Tu born in England as Elsie Elliott; Hong Kong social activist who originally came to Hong Kong as a missionary; outspoken critic of British colonialism, and advocate for LGBTQ rights, better housing, welfare services, playgrounds, bus routes, and hawker licenses. Her campaign against corruption is credited with the establishment of the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) in 1974; she served as a member of the Urban Council (1963- 1995), the Provisional Legislative Council (1997-1998), and the Legislative Council (1988-1995). She lived to be 102 years old.
- June 2, 1918 – Ruth Atkinson born in Canada, American cartoonist and one of the first women comic book writer-artists, working for Iger Studio, a comic book “packager” that produced comic books on an out-source basis; creator of the Marvel Comics character Millie the Model, the publisher’s longest-running humor title, and the Patsy Walker series.
- June 2, 1918 – Kathryn Tucker Windham born, American storyteller, author, photographer, folklorist and journalist; the first woman hired as a journalist by the Alabama Journal in 1939; worked for the Birmingham News (1944-1956); worked for the Selma Times-Journal after that, and won several Associated Press awards for writing and photography; published a series of “true” ghost story collections, and many books about the Southern states, including recipe books and folklore; after appearing at the National Storytelling Festival in Tennessee, she made frequent appearances at storytelling events, and on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.
- June 2, 1921 – Betty Wishnick-Freeman born, American concert manager, photographer, and philanthropist-advocate for contemporary music who assisted several composers with grants and commissions, including John Cage, Philip Glass, Pierre Boulez, Virgil Thompson, and others.
- June 2, 1924 – June Callwood born, Canadian journalist, author, and social activist; worked for the Brantford Expositor, then the Toronto Globe and Mail; ghost-writer for several autobiographies including Barbara Walters and Otto Preminger; she and her husband Trent Frayne hosted a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) television talk show The Fraynes (1954-1955), which led later to her own shows In Touch, National Treasures, and Caregiving with June Callwood; she was a well-known activist for social justice, especially issues affecting women and children, involved with over 50 Canadian social action organizations, including youth and women’s hostels, and founded Casey House in Toronto for people with AIDS, Jessie’s (now called Jessie’s: The June Callwood Centre for Young Women), PEN Canada, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, and Feminists Against Censorship; Companion of the Order of Canada, awarded as the highest degree of merit for a Canadian civilian.
- June 2, 1935 – Carol Shields born in America, Canadian novelist and short story writer; her best-known novel, The Stone Diaries, won the Canadian Governor General’s Award for English language fiction, and the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the only novel to date to win both of these awards (Shields, as an American-born naturalized Canadian was eligible for both prizes). It also won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was nominated for the Man Booker Prize.
- June 2, 1937 – The Right Honourable Rosalyn Cohen Higgins born, Baroness Higgins, British judge and legal scholar; first woman elected to the International Court of Justice (ICJ – 1995-2009), and the ICJ’s first woman President (2006-2009); in 2009, she was appointed as advisor on International Law to the British Government’s inquiry into the Iraq War, headed by Sir John Chilcot, and often called the Chilcot Inquiry (2009-2016). Higgins has published several influential works on international law, including Problems and Process: International Law and How We Use It.
- June 2, 1949 – Heather Couper born, British astronomer and science populariser; British Astronomical Association president (1984-1986), and Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society since 1970; lecturer at Greenwich Planetarium and the Old Royal Observatory (1977-1983); television presenter since 1981; author and co-author of several astronomy and space books, and astronomy correspondent for The Independent newspaper; popular presenter on radio, television and at public lectures; won the Sir Arthur Clarke Award in 2008 with Martin Redfern for BBC Radio 4 programme Britain’s Space Race.
- June 2, 1950 – Anne Phillips born, a leading figure in feminist political theory; Graham Wallas Professor of Political Science, and Professor of Political and Gender Theory at the London School of Economics; carried out a research project on tensions between sexual and cultural equality in the British Courts (2002-2004); collaborated on an exploration of gender and culture issues in their specifically European context (2005-2008); Fellow of the British Academy since 2003; co-winner of the American Political Science Association’s Victoria Schuck Award for Best Book on Women and Politics, Engineering Democracy.
- June 2, 1953 – Elizabeth II crowned Queen of the United Kingdom at Westminster Abbey, beginning the longest reign of a British monarch.
- June 2, 1959 – Rineke Dijkstra born, Dutch photographer, noted for single portraits, often in a series, showing a group of people, such as Beach Portraits (1992) and Israeli soldiers (1999-2000); she also did a series of photographs of a single subject, Almerisa, a Bosnian refugee, taken every two years from age 6 until age 18, from an asylum centre through her family’s relocation in Western Europe; awarded an Honorary Fellowship by the Royal Photographic Society, and the 2017 Hasselblad Award.
- June 2, 1964 – Caroline Link born, German film director and screenwriter of documentary and feature films; her first feature film, Jenseits der Stille (Beyond Silence, 1996) was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and won the Tokyo Sakura Grand Prix; her third feature film, Nirgendwo in Afrika (Nowhere in Africa, 2001), won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
- June 2, 1966 – Candace Gingrich born, American LGBTQ+ rights activist at the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), served as the HRC’s National Coming Out Project spokesperson in 1995, and was one of Ms. Magazine’s 1995 Women of the Year; currently Senior Manager of the HRC’s Youth & Campus Outreach, and coordinator of the HRC University Internship Program; her autobiography, Accidental Activist: A Personal and Political Memoir, was published in 1996; she is politician Newt Gingrich’s half-sister.
- June 2, 1971 – Kateřina Jacques born, Czech Green Party politician; elected to the Czech Republic’s lower house in 2006, representing Prague; previously director of the human rights section of the prime minister’s office.
- June 2, 1975 – International Sex Workers Day commemorates the Occupation of Saint-Nizier in Lyon by over 100 prostitutes protesting their inhumane working conditions. The women occupied the church for eight days, until police removed them on June 10. Other churches were soon occupied by protestors in Paris, Marseille, Grenoble, Saint-Étienne and Montpellier. French police had been increasing reprisals against prostitutes, forcing them into greater secrecy, which increased the violence against them. In April, 1975, the Lyon prostitutes organized, and their leader, known as ‘Ulla’ appeared on television with their demands. After three women were murdered, and the government’s continued in difference to their plight, they went on strike and occupied the church. They demanded the end of fines and police harassment, and the release from jail of ten of them who had been imprisoned a few days earlier for soliciting. The striking workers sang political chants and demanded decent working conditions and an end to stigma, becoming headline news nationally, and reports in the international press. Some local people supported their strike, bringing them clothes and food, while political, union and feminist organizations also announced their support. The parish priest refused to call police to remove the women, but the French government ordered the police to forcibly clear the church. The Minister of the Interior, Michel Poniatowski, claimed the women had been manipulated into the occupation by pimps, and the Womens Rights Minister, Françoise Giroud, refused to meet with the women, claiming she was not competent in the matter. This event was a flash point which launched an international movement for sex worker’s rights.
- June 2, 1978 – Yi So-yeon born, biotechnologist, and the first Korean woman astronaut in space. She is a member of the Association of Spaceflight Professionals, an organization founded to “develop the next generation of commercial astronauts through networking, education, research and mission opportunities.”
- June 2, 1985 – Maggie Thrash born, American young adult fiction writer and memoirist; noted for her graphic novel memoir Honor Girl, describing coming out in her teens as a lesbian at a conservative summer camp, and her Strange Truth mystery series.
- June 2, 2019 – A report on widespread killings and disappearances of indigenous women and girls in Canada said the violence amounts “to a race-based genocide of indigenous peoples.” The report concludes that the “genocide has been empowered by colonial structures,” and fueled by “appalling apathy.” The report describes the chronic abuse of indigenous people, including at residential schools where indigenous children were once sent. Indigenous women and girls make up 4% of Canada’s women and girls, but they are 16% of those killed. Royal Canadian Mounted Police figures show that 1,181 indigenous women were killed or disappeared in Canada from 1980 to 2012, but indigenous advocates say many deaths go unreported so the real number is higher.
- June 2, 2020 – In the U.S., as states continue to lift restrictions that were put in place to curb the coronavirus outbreak and as Americans start going out in public again, recent surveys suggest that gender, political affiliation, and education level are factors that have a bearing on who is wearing a mask, and who isn’t. Public health officials have recommended wearing masks in public when social distancing measures are difficult to maintain, such as in grocery stores and pharmacies, and at least a dozen states have required them in those circumstances. And most businesses that are reopening are doing so with restrictions: fewer customers, social distancing and face masks. American women are over 50% more likely to wear a mask than American men. Covid-19 cases in the U.S. were reduced by an estimated 450,000 cases by mask-wearing and social distancing as of May 22, 2020.
- June 2, 2021 – The Generation Equality Forum concluded its meeting in Paris, announcing the launch of a global five-year action plan to accelerate gender equality by 2026. The Forum’s bold, action-oriented agenda will be under-written by nearly $40 Billion USD of confirmed investments as well as ambitious policy and programme commitments from governments, philanthropy, civil society, youth organizations, and the private sector. The monumental project comes at a critical moment as the world assesses the disproportionate and negative impact that COVID-19 has had on women and girls. “The Generation Equality Forum marks a positive, historic shift in power and perspective. Together we have mobilized across different sectors of society, from south to north, to become a formidable force, ready to open a new chapter in gender equality,” said Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Executive Director of UN Women. “The Forum’s ecosystem of partners – and the investments, commitments, and energy they are bringing to confront the greatest barriers to gender equality – will ensure faster progress for the world’s women and girls than we have seen before.”
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- June 3, 1733 – Eleanor Coade born, British businesswoman and proponent of women’s rights, who manufactured Neoclassical statues, architectural decorations and garden ornaments made of Lithodipyra, also called Coade stone, from 1769 until her death in 1821. Lithodipyra (“stone fired twice”) was a high-quality, durable moulded weather-resistant, ceramic stoneware; statues and decorative features from this still look almost new today. Coade did not invent ‘artificial stone’, as various inferior quality precursors had been both patented and manufactured before, but she likely perfected both the clay recipe and the firing process. Her company produced stoneware for St George’s Chapel, Windsor; The Royal Pavilion, Brighton; Carlton House, London; and the Royal Naval College, Greenwich. Shortly after her death, the company produced a large quantity of stoneware used in the refurbishment of Buckingham Palace. She was born into a Nonconformist (devout Baptist) family, and her grandmother Sarah Enchmarch was a successful businesswoman in the wool textile business in Tiverton. Eleanor Coade began in business as a linen draper in the City of London, using ‘Mrs’ as a courtesy title as was the custom for unmarried women of the day who ran businesses, or were in senior positions as servants, such as housekeepers or cooks. After her father went bankrupt and died in 1769, she bought an artificial stone factory, and lived on the premises for the first several years. She developed her talent as a modeler, and exhibited several pieces each year between 1773 and 1780 at the Society of Artists. In her will, after making bequests to her family, she left much of her fortune to charity schools, clergy, and to some of her women friends, with the provision that their husbands would have no control over the funds. The Coade Stone, part of a mill in the factory, was placed under Westminster Bridge by the footpath to Royal Festival Hall, which now occupies the former site of Coade’s factory, at “Narrow Wall,” and commemorates both Coade and her factory.
- June 3, 1879 – Alla Nazimova born, Ukrainian-American actress, successful producer-screenwriter for Metro Pictures of several films, including adaptations of works by Oscar Wilde (Salomé) and Henrik Ibsen (A Doll’s House), developing her own filmmaking techniques; she is credited with the phrase ‘sewing circle’ as a discreet code for lesbianism, she had affairs with Actor-Theatre Producer Eva Le Gallienne, film director Dorothy Arzner, and writer Mercedes de Acosta.
- June 3, 1897 – Memphis Minnie, born as Lizzie Douglas, American Blues singer-songwriter and guitarist.
- June 3, 1898 – Rosa Chacel born, notable and controversial Spanish writer and feminist. She was the daughter of a teacher in Valladolid, a sickly child who was sent by her mother to live with her grandmother in Madrid in 1908. By 1909, she was enrolled in a school to study drawing, but briefly became interested in sculpture, until she abandoned art in 1918. She became a regular at cafes in Madrid where aspiring writers from all over Spain and Europe met, but was dismissed by most of the men because she was a vocal champion of women’s potential and a ‘new way to live’ for the Modern Woman. In 1921, she married Timoteo Perez Rubio, a well-known painter, and they moved to Rome after he received a scholarship to study at the Academia de España en Roma. In 1927, they returned to Madrid. She published her first novel, “Estacion, Ida y Vuelta” in 1930. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, her husband enlisted in the Republican Army, and Chacel became a nurse, but was soon forced to take their son, and move frequently, to Barcelona, Valencia, and then to Paris. Meanwhile, her husband was responsible for moving the treasures of the Museo del Prado to safety, during the siege of Madrid (1936-1939). At the end of the war, the family was reunited, and went into exile in Brazil. In 1959, Chacel won a Guggenheim Fellowship, and went to New York, where she was finally able to resume writing (1959-1961). She returned to Spain in 1961, but left to go back to Brazil (1963-1973), then once again went back to Spain. She flew back and forth between Madrid and Rio de Janiero until her husband died in Rio in 1977. Chacel wrote more novels, and began to receive recognition, including the Premio nacional de las letras españolas, in 1987, and the 1990 Premio Castilla y Leon de las letras.
- June 3, 1900 – Adelaide Ames born, American astronomer and research assistant at Harvard; member of the American Astronomical Society; co-author of A Survey of the External Galaxies Brighter Than the Thirteenth Magnitude; killed in a boating accident in 1932.
- June 3, 1906 – Josephine Baker born, black American-French actress, singer, dancer, civil rights activist, and resistance operative. After touring on the vaudeville circuit and appearing in shows in New York, she was frustrated by American racism, and in 1925 at age 19, moved to France. She was hired by the Follies Bergère, and was a headliner in the La Revue Nègre. In 1937, she married French industrialist Jean Lion, and became a French citizen. During WWII, she was a French Resistance operative, gathering information from German, Italian, and Japanese officials at embassy and ministry parties. After the war, she and her husband adopted 12 orphans from around the world. She died at age 68 in 1975 and was buried in Paris with full military honors.
- June 3, 1916 – Gloria Martin born, socialist feminist, co-founder of Seattle Radical Women, who also started Shakespeare & Martin Booksellers.
- June 3, 1919 – Elizabeth Duncan Koontz born, first African-American president of the National Education Association, and Director of the U.S. Women’s Bureau (1969-1973).
- June 3, 1924 – Colleen Dewhurst born, actress, winner of 4 Emmy Awards, 2 Tony Awards, 2 Obie Awards, and 2 Gemini awards. President of the Actors’ Equity Association (1985-1991).
- June 3, 1926 – Flora I. MacDonald born, Canadian politician and humanitarian; one of the first women to vie for leadership of a major Canadian political party, the Progressive Conservatives, as a member of the ‘Red Tory’ wing; a Member of Parliament (1972-1988); Minister of Communications (1986-1988); Minister of Employment and Immigration (1984-1986). Intensely involved in the global response to the Vietnamese boat people crisis after the Vietnam War, creating a plan in which the Canadian government matched funding for the number of refugees sponsored by members of the Canadian general public, allowing over 60,00o Vietnamese refugees to enter Canada. As Canada’s first woman foreign minister as Secretary of State for External Affairs (1979-1980), she authorized the issue of false passports and money to American diplomats who took refuge in the Canadian Embassy in Tehran during the Iran hostage crisis, which enabled them to leave the country with the Canadian staff. At the 1979 Commonwealth Conference in Lusaka, she drove out to spend five hours in a Zimbabwean refugee camp. She left politics in 1988, and was Chair of the Board of Canada’s International Development Research Centre (1992-1997). MacDonald was made Companion of the Order of Canada in 1998.
- June 3, 1930 – Marion Zimmer Bradley born, American science fiction-fantasy author, poet; best known for The Mists of Avalon and her Darkover books. In 2014, Moira Greyland, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s daughter, revealed her mother had sexually abused her and other children for over a decade.
- June 3, 1946 – Anita Pollack born in Australia, Labour Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for London South West (1989-1999) and non-fiction author. She moved to London in 1969, and became a naturalized UK citizen in 2005 (citizens of Commonwealth countries who are residents in the UK can vote and run for office in the UK before gaining UK citizenship). Author of Wreckers or Builders? and New Labour in Europe.
- June 3, 1950 – Melissa Mathison born, American film and television screenwriter, Tibetan freedom activist; noted for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and The Black Stallion. Mathison was on the board of the International Campaign for Tibet. She died in 2015 from neuroendocrine cancer at age 65.
- June 3, 1954 – Susan Landau born, American mathematician, engineer, and cybersecurity policy expert; Bridge Professor in Cybersecurity at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University; author of Listening In: Cybersecurity in an Insecure Age (2017).
- June 3, 1959 – Imbi Paju born in Estonia, resident in Finland; journalist, writer and documentary filmmaker; correspondent for the Estonian newspapers Eesti Päevaleht and Postimees; wrote the book and made the film of Memories Denied, about her mother’s experiences in a Soviet labor camp, and the occupation of Estonia, which won international attention, and was selected for the Swedish school program Living History.
- June 3, 1960 – Catherine Davani born, first woman judge in Papua, New Guinea; served on her country’s Supreme Court (2001-2016); member of the Lawyers Statutory Committee (1995-2001).
- June 3, 1972 – Sally Jane Priesand is the first woman ordained by a U.S. rabbinical seminary.
- June 3, 2012 – The Diamond Jubilee pageant for Elizabeth II takes place on the River Thames.
- June 3, 2018 – A new study funded by the National Cancer Institute and sales of a breast cancer postage stamp has found that many women with early-stage breast cancer can skip chemotherapy without reducing their chances of survival. A genetic test gauges risk by looking at a gene involved in recurrence of the disease. Up to 70,000 patients a year could safely avoid chemotherapy, the study indicates. These patients, whose cancer has not spread to the lymph nodes and is fueled by hormones, would still have to undergo surgery and hormone treatment. “The impact is tremendous,” said study leader Dr. Joseph Sparano.
- June 3, 2018 – Saudi Arabia issued driving licenses for the first time in decades to ten Saudi women, prior to the day when the ban on women drivers was officially lifted, but at the same time, it cracked down on women’s rights activists. Almost a dozen women’s and human rights activists were arrested, accused of being “traitors” and working with foreign powers. Loujain al-Hathloul, a campaigner who defied the ban on women driving, Eman al-Nafjan, a women’s rights blogger, and television producer Nouf Abdulaziz, a human rights activist, were detained and held incommunicado, as were several other women and men who spoke out in favor of women’s rights and against human rights abuses.
- June 3, 2020 – As the pandemic continues to kill African American men at a higher rate than other demographics, according to an Economic Policy Institute survey, African American women had the highest unemployment rate in the nation as 18.8% of black women workers lost their jobs between February and April in 2020. In 2018, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that black women aged 20 and older participated in the labor force at a rate of 62.4%. “Black women are nearly twice as likely as white men to say that they’d either been laid off, furloughed, or had their hours and/or pay reduced because of the COVID-19 pandemic,” according to research conducted by the non-profit Lean In, “Black women are the most likely to be concerned about being able to pay for basic necessities.”
- June 3, 2021 – Women with hereditary breast cancer, triggered by the BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes, will stand a better chance of survival following successful trials of olaparib, a drug that cuts the likelihood of the cancer returning after treatment. The results of a major two-and-a-half year trial of olaparib, which were published in the New England Journal of Medicine and presented online at the American Society of Clinical Oncology conference, showed it reduced the relative risk of invasive recurrence, second cancers, or death by over 40%. Until this trial, there was nothing to help women with the inherited breast cancer genes – who are often young and suffer from the most severe forms of cancer. Olaparib works by stopping cancer cells from being able to repair their DNA by inhibiting a molecule called PARP, causing cancer cells to die. It works particularly well for patients with faulty versions of the BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes, which are normally involved in another system for repairing DNA. In the trial, significant side-effects were reported to be relatively infrequent.
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- June 4, 1394 – Philippa of England born; married Eric of Pomerania, heir to the throne of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, and was Queen from 1406 until her death in 1430. Noted for her significant participation in state affairs, and her role as soror ab extra (lay sister) of Vadstena Abbey in Sweden. She donated a holy relic, established a choir, and successfully petitioned Pope Martin V for an exception for the abbey after he banned double monasteries (separate communities of monks and nuns living in the same monastic complex) in 1422. She was a trusted advisor to her husband, who altered the terms of her dowry to give her a single immense dower land in Central Sweden. As Eric’s proxy, she was frequently given power to handle Swedish affairs in his name. When King Eric went on pilgrimage (1423-1425), she served as regent of the three kingdoms, and solved a dispute with the Hanseatic League by establishing a new convention for the validity of the coinage system. She organized the defense of the Danish capital during the 1428 Bombardment of Copenhagen by a fleet of ships sent by an alliance of Northern German city-states. Philippa died in 1430 at age 35, after giving birth to a stillborn baby while she was already suffering from an unidentified illness.
- June 4, 1784 – Eight months after the first manned balloon flight, Élisabeth Thible becomes the first woman to fly in an untethered hot air balloon. Her flight with M. Fleurant covers four kilometers in 45 minutes, and reaches an estimated altitude of 1,500 meters. She dressed as the goddess Minerva, and fed the firebox to keep them aloft.
- June 4, 1866 – Miina Sillanpää born, key figure in the Finnish workers’ movement and editor of two different magazines for working women. One of nine children in a peasant family, she went to work at age 12 in a cotton factory, then at a nail factory. In 1884, at age 18, she moved to the city of Porvoo and became a maid – 4 years later, she founded the Servant’s Association and became its director in 1898; in 1907 she was one of the first 19 women to be elected to parliament in the world, and served intermittently for 38 years. Among her many accomplishments, she was one of the architects of Finland’s first Municipal Homemaking Act, which didn’t become law until 1950, a system of municipal homemakers paid by their municipalities to help rural families with children who were living in poverty; she was the first woman minister in Finland, as the Minister of Social Affairs (1926-1927); in 2016, the Finnish government declared October 1st an official day to raise the Finnish flag in her honor.
- June 4, 1870 – Virginia Ragsdale born, American mathematician; graduated from Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1887 as valedictorian. She was a founder of Guilford’s Alumni Association. Ragsdale was awarded a scholarship to Bryn Mawr because she had the highest scholastic average of women graduates in her year. She studied physics at Bryn Mawr with Charlotte Agnes Scott, then won a scholarship to study for a year at the University of Göttingen, in Germany. When she returned, she taught school until another scholarship allowed her to complete her Ph.D. at Bryn Mawr. Her dissertation, “On the Arrangement of the Real Branches of Plane Algebraic Curves,” was published in 1906 by the American Journal of Mathematics. Ragsdale was hired by the mathematics department (1911-1928) at Woman’s College in Greensboro (now University of North Carolina at Greensboro), and was the department’s head (1926-1928). She retired in 1928 to care for her ailing mother. Ragsdale bequeathed her home to Guilford College, which now serves as the house of the college’s president.
- June 4, 1879 – Mabel Lucie Atwell born, successful British illustrator and comics artist, specializing in cute babies and toddlers for everything from cards and calendars to children’s china and nursery equipment; illustrator for children’s classics like Mother Goose, The Water Babies, and Alice in Wonderland, but also contributed to popular periodicals like The Tatler and The Illustrated London News, and advertising artwork.
- June 4, 1881 – Natalya Goncharova born, Russian modernist painter-sculptor-stage designer; co-founder of the artistic groups Jack of Diamonds and Donkey’s Tail.
- June 4, 1907 – Patience Strong born as Winifred May; English lyricist, poet, and author of books on Christianity and psychology; she wrote lyrics for over 100 songs, and daily poems for her own column, The Quiet Corner, for The Daily Mirror newspaper, and for the weekly magazine Woman’s Own.
- June 4, 1912 – Massachusetts was the first U.S. state to enact a minimum wage law, which only applied to women and to children under age 18. It doesn’t set a standard wage, just a panel to study complaints about low wages; employers found to pay wages inadequate to cover the cost of living and maintain a worker’s health, are reprimanded by having their names printed in local newspapers. This made little difference in what women and children earned. Women working in the mills only earned between $5 and $7 a week working 50 hours, but the actual cost of living was at least $10 for a woman not living at home, and even young women still living with their families weren’t earning enough to pay for their expenses. Some women turned to prostitution. The work was also dangerous and harmful to the workers’ health: 36% of mill workers died before their 25th birthdays. However, 52% of the wages paid then in Lawrence, Massachusetts, one of the biggest mill towns, were paid to mill workers.
- June 4, 1913 – Emily Davison, British suffragette, is trampled by King George V’s horse Anmer at the Epsom Derby after she rushes out on the course carrying a white, green and purple suffrage flag. She never regains consciousness, and dies four days later.
- June 4, 1917 – Laura E. Richards and Maude H. Elliott, assisted by Florence H. Hall, receive the first Pulitzer for Biography for their biography of their mother Julia Ward Howe.
- June 4, 1918 – Muriel Byck born in London, daughter of French Jews who had become British nationals; she was an agent of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), Britain’s WWII top secret espionage-sabotage-reconnaissance operatives in occupied Europe. She and her family had lived in Germany (1923-1924), and then lived in France, before moving to England in 1930. Byck worked as a secretary in London (1936-1938), and became an Assistant Stage Manager at the Gate Theatre in 1937. At the outbreak of WWII, she became a volunteer worker for the Red Cross and the Women’s Voluntary Service, worked as a National Registration clerk in Torquay in 1941, then joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force in 1942, working in the records office, and rising to the rank of Section officer. Because she spoke excellent French, she was recruited by the SOE in 1943. After instruction which included para-military training and wireless radio operation, she received high scores in Morse Code, and Mechanical Aptitude, and was parachuted into France in April, 1944, with three male agents. She worked on the SOE Ventriloquist Circuit as a wireless operator and instructor in wireless transmission for French recruits. Her code name was Violette. She made her transmissions from a garage in Limoges where German trucks and cars were repaired. A German soldier became suspicious of her, but she moved to a new location in Salbris before the local Gestapo arrived. Her new identity was as a Parisian secretary on sick leave, claiming she had to take medication every few hours, even at night, to cover being up late at night sending messages. Later she moved again to the home of a blacksmith in Vernou. She worked long hours as a wireless operator, under the constant stress of being found out. Byck became seriously ill with meningitis, and had to risk being taken to hospital, where the Germans scrutinized all the papers of incoming patients. She was given a lumbar puncture, but died shortly afterward on May 23, 1944, at the age of 25.
- June 4, 1919 – The U.S. Congress finally approved the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing suffrage to women, and sent it to U.S. states for ratification. The first attempt at a Constitutional amendment securing women’s right to vote was introduced in the U.S. Senate in 1878 by Senator Aaron A. Sargent from California. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other suffrage leaders testified before the Senate, but it languished in committee for nine years, finally reaching the Senate floor in 1887, where it was rejected, a 34-to-16 vote against.
- June 4, 1923 – Elizabeth Jolley born in England, Australian novelist, non-fiction writer and pioneering Australian creative writing teacher. The Well won the 1986 Miles Franklin Literary Award for presentation of Australian life, and The Georges’ Wife won the 1994 National Book Council Award. Jolley was honored in 1997 as an Australian Living Treasure.
- June 4, 1926 – Judith Malina born in Germany, American co-founder of The Living Theatre, a radical political theatre troupe prominent in New York and Paris in the 1950s and 1960s; honored in 2008 with an Artistic Achievement Award given by the New York Innovative Theatre Awards for Off-Off-Broadway.
- June 4, 1928 – Ruth Westheimer born in Germany, Jewish immigrant to the U.S., famous as ‘Dr, Ruth,’ sex therapist, media personality, and author of over 35 books on sexuality.
- June 4, 1934 – Dame Monica Dacon born, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines educator and politician; acting Governor-General of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (2002); Deputy Governor General (2001); teacher at her alma mater, The Girl’s School, for fifteen years, then lecturer at St. Vincent Teachers’ Training College.
- June 4, 1934 – Dame Daphne Sheldrick born in Kenya of British parents; Kenyan author, conservationist, and expert in reintegrating orphaned animals, especially elephants, into the wild; the first person to perfect a substitute milk formula for elephants and rhinos; co-warden with her husband David of Tsavo National Park (1955-1976). When her husband died in 1978, she founded the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Nairobi, which operates the most successful orphan-elephant rescue and rehabilitation programme in the world, and runs mobile veterinary units, anti-poaching teams, and other projects to safeguard habitats and educate the public.
- June 4, 1940 – Dorothy Rudd Moore born, African American composer; co-founder of the Society of Black Composers; she composed song cycles, chamber music, orchestral music, and an opera, Frederick Douglass, which premiered in 1985. Moore also taught at the Harlem School of the Arts and New York University. She died at age 81 in 2022.
- June 4, 1951 – Wendy Pini born, co-creator of the Elfquest series of comics and graphic novels.
- June 4, 1953 – Linda Lingle born, American Republican politician, first woman and first Jewish governor of Hawaii (2002-2010).
- June 4, 1955 – Paulina Chiziane born, Mozambican author of novels and short stories, who writes in Portuguese. She won the 2021 Camões Award for Portuguese Literature for her work as a novelist. Known for Balada de Amor ao Vento (Love Ballad to the Wind) and O Setimo Juramento (The Seventh Oath).
- June 4, 1956 – Joyce Sidman born, American poet and children’s author; Dark Emperor & Other Poems of the Night was a 2011 Newbery Honor Book.
- June 4, 1966 – Svetlana Jitomirskaya born, Ukrainian mathematician, noted for pioneering work on non-perturbative quasiperiodic localization. Earned her undergraduate degree and PhD (1991) from Moscow State University. Since 1990 she has held a research position at the Institute for Earthquake Prediction Theory in Moscow. In 1991, she came with her family to Southern California, and started at the University of California, Irvine, as a part-time lecturer (1991-1992), then rose through the ranks to become a visiting assistant professor (1992-1994), and a regular faculty member (since 1994). She took a leave from UCI to spend nine months at Caltech (1996). She was a Sloan Fellow (1996-2000) and a speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2002. In 2005, Jitomirskaya was awarded the Ruth Lyle Satter Prize from the American Mathematical Society, a prize recognizing outstanding contributions to mathematics research by a woman in the previous five years.
- June 4, 1975 – Angelina Jolie born, American actress, director, and screenwriter; made her directorial and screenwriting debut with In the Land of Blood and Honey, set during the Bosnian conflict of the 1990s. She then helmed the WWII drama Unbroken (2014), based on the ordeal of Olympic runner and U.S. Air Force officer who became a Japanese prisoner of war after his plane crashed. She directed, wrote, and starred in 2015’s By the Sea, and 2017’s First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers , an adaptation of Loung Ung’s memoir. She won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Girl, Interrupted. She became a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) in 2001, and paid all her expenses on over 40 field missions to refugee camps and war zones in more than 30 countries, and earned a pilot license so she could help ferry aid workers and supplies. In 2012, the UNHCR expanded her role, making her a Special Envoy. Jolie also bought 60,000 hectares of land in Cambodia and turned it into a wildlife reserve.
- June 4, 1982 – Urged by UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta H. Fore, on August 19, 1982, at an emergency special session on the question of Palestine, the UN General Assembly, “appalled at the great number of innocent Palestinian and Lebanese children, victims of Israel’s acts of aggression,” decided to commemorate the fourth of June of each year as the International Day of Innocent Child Victims of Aggression.
- June 4, 2018 – Masterpiece Cakeshop vs Colorado Civil Rights Commission: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Colorado baker who refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission had not respected baker Jack Phillips’ religious beliefs when it found he violated anti-discrimination laws. Kennedy wrote that the baker, as a business owner, “might have his right to the free exercise of religion limited by generally applicable laws,” but “the delicate question of when the free exercise of his religion must yield to an otherwise valid exercise of state power” can only be addressed when there is no “religious hostility” from the state. Only Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor dissented. In her dissent, Justice Ginsburg pointed out that “Phillips would not sell to [Charlie] Craig and [David] Mullins, for no reason other than their sexual orientation, a cake of the kind he regularly sold to others. When a couple contacts a bakery for a wedding cake, the product they are seeking is a cake celebrating their wedding—not a cake celebrating heterosexual weddings or same-sex weddings—and that is the service Craig and Mullins were denied. Colorado, the Court does not gainsay, prohibits precisely the discrimination Craig and Mullins encountered.”
- June 4, 2020 – Nigerian activists urged the ratification of the Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) Act, passed by the federal government in 2015 to ban all forms of violence and provide justice for such crimes. It took a 14-year campaign by women’s groups and gender activists demanding better legal protection for women and girls to get the law passed. But since then, only 9 out Nigeria’s 36 states have ratified the act. Some states do have relevant domestic violence laws, but an estimated two million Nigerian women and girls are sexually assaulted every year, according to Nigeria’s Minister of Women Affairs and Social Development, even though most of the crimes go unreported, due to the stigma of being a rape victim, fear of reprisals, and distrust of authorities. Recent news stories, of the death of a 22-year-old microbiology student at the University of Benin who was raped and brutally beaten after she went to study at a church, and the case of a 12-year-old girl gang raped by 11 men, have sparked outrage and renewed calls for completing ratification of the act. #JusticeForUwa, the student who was raped and beaten to death, spread across Nigeria media, but her killer or killers remain uncaught. However, the eleven gang rapists are under arrest and awaiting prosecution. Partly as a result, as of 2021, 18 of the 36 states had ratified the law.
- June 4, 2021 – In Hong Kong, thousands of officers were deployed to enforce a ban on protests and gatherings in memory of the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests. In previous years, Hong Kong had been the only place in mainland China where commemorations were tolerated. Chow Hang Tung is a barrister and vice-chair of the Hong Kong Alliance, a group which organizes annual vigils for the victims of China’s 1989 crackdown. She was arrested by Hong Kong police, accused of using social media to promote an unauthorized assembly, and taking part in an unauthorized assembly. Four other members of the alliance were arrested later. Chow Hang Tung was sentenced to 22 months in prison. The United Nations Human Rights Council criticised China’s national security law, as exhibiting "fundamental incompatibility with international law and with China's human rights obligations."
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- June 5, 1646 – Elena Cornaro Piscopia born, Venetian mathematician, philosopher, and linguist; one of the first women to receive an academic degree from a university, and the first woman in the world to earn a PhD. The illegitimate daughter of a nobleman and a peasant – her father later married her mother, but that did not change her status or that of her brothers born out of wedlock. When it was discovered that she was a child prodigy, she was given a classical education by tutors, becoming proficient in Latin, Greek, French, and Spanish by age 7, and also learned Hebrew and Arabic, earning the title “Oraculum Septilingue” and went on to study mathematics, philosophy, theology, and music, playing several instruments and composing music. In her twenties, she took up physics and astronomy. She rebuffed all her father’s attempts to marry her off, and took the habit of a Benedictine Oblate, but without taking the vows to become a nun. Felice Rotondi, her advisor in theology, petitioned the University of Padua to grant her the laurea (equivalent to a bachelor’s degree) in theology, but Gregorio Cardinal Barbarigo, the bishop of Padua, refused to allow it because she was a woman, but did allow her to work toward a degree in Philosophy, which was conferred on her in 1678, with great ceremony in Padua Cathedral, attended by most of the Venetian Senate, the University authorities and faculty, and guests invited from the Universities of Bologna, Perugia, Rome and Naples. The Lady Elena discoursed for an hour in classical Latin on the works of Aristotle. She then devoted herself to study and charitable works until her death from tuberculosis in 1684 at age 38.
- June 5, 1660 – Sarah Churchill born, married John Churchill, First Duke of Marlborough, but was an influential figure in her own right, through her close friendship and support of Queen Anne before 1711, and later, her inheritance as a widow which made her one of the richest women in Europe.
- June 5, 1836 – Miriam Folline Squiers Leslie born, author, publisher, and suffragist; after her husband Frank died, she took over his publishing business, then legally changed her name to ‘Frank Leslie’; she bequeathed most of her estate to Carrie Chapman Catt, to be used for the cause of women’s suffrage.
- June 5, 1851 – Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery serial, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly, starts a ten-month run in the National Era abolitionist newspaper.
- June 5, 1884 – Ivy Compton-Burnett born, English novelist, author of over 20 dark and sometimes humorous books about families and domesticity, including Pastors and Masters, A House and Its Head, Daughters and Sons, Manservant and Maidservant.
- June 5, 1887 – Ruth Fulton Benedict born, American anthropologist and folklorist, President of the American Anthropological Association, member of the American Folklore Society. Her fieldwork among the Native Americans of the Southwest provided the basis of her first book, Patterns of Culture, in which she compared and contrasted Zuñi, Dobu, and Kwakiutl. She also wrote The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, and “The Races of Mankind,” a WWII pamphlet for the troops showing racism wasn’t grounded in scientific reality. Margaret Mead was one of her students.
- June 5, 1914 – Beatrice de Cardi born, British archaeologist, a specialist in the Persian Gulf, Qatar, Baluchistan, and Pakistan. She studied history, Latin, economics and archaeology at University College London (1933-1935), and worked for Sir Mortimer Wheeler, director of the London Museum (1936-1939), first as his secretary and later as his assistant. During WWII, she was based in Chungking, China, working for the Allied Supplies Executive of the War Cabinet, but she frequently visited India. After the war, de Cardi was Britain’s Assistant Trade Commissioner in Karachi, Delhi, and Lahore. She worked with Sadar Din of the Pakistani Archeological Department constructing archaeological surveys in western Baluchistan, collecting ceramic potsherds, copper objects, bone, and flint from a number of sites in Jhalawan. In the 1960s, she discovered distinctive pottery at sites near the Bampur River which led to a new understanding of the nature of trade links in the Persian Gulf region in the Bronze Age. She also carried out work in the Persian Gulf, and launched a number of expeditions in the United Arab Emirates that yielded the first examples of Ubaid pottery in the region, and also discovered more than 20 tombs from the second millennium B.C. In 1973, the government of Qatar appointed de Cardi to lead an archaeological expedition aiming to illustrate Qatar’s history for its new national museum. Her team discovered domestic tools and pottery which suggested that Qatar had traded with other regions much longer ago than previously thought. She didn’t give up field work until she was over 90 years old, and lived to be 102.
- June 5, 1915 – Danish women win the right to vote.
- June 5, 1930 – Alifa Rifaat born as Fatimah Rifaat, Egyptian author of controversial short stories which focused on the dynamics of female sexuality, relationships, and loss in rural Egyptian culture, while her protagonists still maintain their religious faith, and accept their fates. She did not attempt to undermine the patriarchal system, but used her work to depict problems inherent in a patriarchal society when men do not adhere to their religious teachings that advocate for the kind treatment of women; noted for Distant View of a Minaret, Bahiyya’s Eyes and My World of the Unknown.
- June 5, 1937 – Hélène Cixous born, French academic, feminist writer, poet, and rhetorician; her article Le Rire de la Méduse (The Laugh of Medusa) in 1975 established her as an early theorist of poststructuralist feminism; she founded the centre of feminist studies at the Centre universitaire de Vincennes of the University of Paris, the first feminist studies program at a European university.
- June 5, 1939 – Margaret Drabble born, Lady Holroyd, English novelist and biographer; The Millstone won the 1966 John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize, and Jerusalem the Golden won the 1967 James Tait Black Memorial Prize; also published biographies of Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson, and critical studies of William Wordsworth and Thomas Hardy; outspoken critic of Britain’s involvement in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the policies of the Bush administration.
- June 5, 1947 – Laurie Anderson born, American avant-garde composer and pioneer in electronic music, musician, film director and multimedia artist. She starred in and directed the 1986 concert film Home of the Brave.
- June 5, 1949 – Orapin Chaiyakan is elected as the first woman member of Thailand’s Parliament.
- June 5, 1949 – Dame Elizabeth Gloster born, British judge, the first woman appointed as a judge of the Commercial Court; served as a Lady Justice of the Court of Appeal of England and Wales (2013-2018), and consequently appointed to the Privy Council; Vice-President of the Court’s Civil Division (2016.-2018).
- June 5, 1949 – Susan Lindquist born, molecular biologist, pioneer in the study of protein folding; her work showed that alternate structural shapes of protein molecules could result in substantially different effects, and demonstrated instances in fields as diverse as human diseases, evolution, and synthetic biomaterials designed to interact with biological systems. Prion proteins are known as disease agents, but her work with yeast prion proteins also demonstrated a mechanism of protein-only inheritance. She extended this to interpret involvement in cellular memory and cross-kingdom communication.
- June 5, 1951 – Suze Orman born, American financial advisor and columnist, author, television host and motivational speaker; published several books, including The Road to Wealth and The Laws of Money.
- June 5, 1953 – Kathleen Kennedy born, American film producer, co-founder with Steven Spielberg and Frank Marshall of Amblin Entertainment; producer of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Jurassic Park, two of the top ten highest-grossing films of the 1990s; president of Lucasfilms since 2012.
- June 5, 1963 – Dame Lois Browne-Evans Day is elected as a Member of the Colonial Parliament, the first black woman to be elected in Bermuda, during the first election in Bermuda in which non-property owners could vote; also the first woman in Bermuda called to the bar.
- June 5, 1964 – Lisa Cholodenko born, American screenwriter and TV and film director; wrote and directed Laurel Canyon and The Kids Are All Right; won a Primetime Emmy for the 2014 miniseries Olive Kitteridge.
- June 5, 1981 – The Center for Disease Control (CDC) describes five cases of a rare form of pneumonia, a deadly immune deficiency disease which later became known as AIDS. By the year 2000, more than 40 million people worldwide are affected by it. Though much progress has been made since then, one demographic (and it’s not gay men) is disproportionately likely to contract HIV. Globally, nearly 1000 girls and women ages 15 to 24 contract HIV every day, and the vast majority of them live in sub-Saharan Africa, where young women are twice as likely as young men to be living with HIV. Stigma and social taboos still surround girls being sexually active, which limits education or open conversation about safe sex and protection, so girls are less likely to get the vital information they need to protect themselves against HIV and other sexually-transmitted diseases. Girls are also more economically vulnerable. With limited opportunities to earn income, girls face pressure to enter into transactional sexual relations, both inside and outside marriage, exchanging unprotected sex for financial support.
- June 5, 2018 – Judge Aaron Persky, who came under heavy fire across the U.S. when he sentenced Stanford swimmer Brock Turner to just six months in jail after he was found guilty of the sexual assault of an unconscious woman, was recalled by Santa Clara County voters in California, by a margin of 61.5% to 38.4%. Michele Dauber, one of the leaders of the recall campaign, said, "Judge Persky is a criminal judge, one of the very few criminal judges, who has jurisdiction over Stanford. So that means that we would be waiting six more years in order to remove him according to the regular election process, and any sexual assaults that happen on the Stanford campus during that time would be highly unlikely to receive a prison sentence based on this precedent. So we think this is dangerous; we can't really let it go on for another six years. We need justice for women now." Persky was the first judge to be recalled in California in over 80 years. (Chief Justice Rose Bird of the California Supreme Court had been removed from office in 1986 when Californians voted by a margin of 52% to 48% not to reconfirm her because of her opposition to the death penalty.)
- June 5, 2019 – The results of a Morning Consult/Politico poll on abortion conducted May 31-June 2 were announced, revealing that 19% of women registered as Democrats said matters that affect women, including birth control, abortion and equal pay, were the top set of issues on their mind when casting votes for federal office, an 8% increase over a poll taken May 3-6, before governors in Georgia and Alabama, quickly followed by Missouri and Louisiana, signed into law draconian anti-abortion laws. 56% of all voters polled said they oppose states passing laws like those in Georgia and Alabama. Only 20% of the Republicans polled said they support a total ban on abortion, while 45% of them thought that abortion should be legal in cases of rape, incest, or when the mother’s life is at risk.
- June 5, 2020 – Reporters in the U.S. covering the George Floyd protests became part of the story of police brutality. The worst incident happened to Linda Tirado, a photojournalist covering the protests in Minneapolis who was shot with a “less lethal” round and permanently lost vision in her left eye. Kaitlin Rust was broadcasting for WAV3 News in Kentucky when an officer took aim and hit her with pepper balls. She shouted, “I’m getting shot,” to her live audience. Analysis by the Guardian newspaper and Bellingcat, which maintains an archive of open source investigatory reporting, had found 148 incidents between May 26 and June 2 of members of the media being attacked or arrested. The Committee to Protect Journalists issued a statement that they have recorded over 300 press-freedom violations just since the end of May, 2020. In 72% of the cases, their credentials were visible, or the incidents happened after the victim had identified themselves as a member of the media. The highest number of attacks occurred in Minneapolis, but attacks were reported in 24 states and in Washington DC. Press freedom advocates cited the denigration of the media by Donald Trump, who has repeatedly labeled the reporters as “scum” and “enemies of the people” as a factor, but the Freedom of the Press Foundation says that over a dozen journalists were tear-gassed and arrested during the Ferguson riots over the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in 2014. Laurie Robinson, a professor of criminology who was co-chair of President Obama’s taskforce on improving relations between police and the public, expressed concern over the heavy military armament and protective gear designed for war now being used by police departments, and said, “We talk about the importance of police having a guardian mindset rather than an occupier or a warrior mindset,” and called for extra training of police officers on how to handle the media during mass protests.
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- June 6, 1539 – Katarina Vasa of Sweden born, oldest daughter of Gustav Vasa; in her marriage contract with Edzard II, Count of East Frisia, she was assured the dower lands of Berum and Norden, and the post of Regent if Edzard should be succeeded by an underage son of hers. Frisia was divided between Edzard and his brother John. From the beginning of her marriage in 1561, she took an active part in policy and the complicated affairs of state. She was strongly Lutheran, and used all her family connections to support her husband in his conflict with his brother John, who was a Calvinist. In 1578, the childless John reluctantly agreed that Catherine and Edzard’s son would be his heir, but the conflict between the brothers continued. When Edzard died in 1599, Catherine took control over her dower lands as an autonomous ruler, declaring herself a vassal directly under the emperor, and refused to acknowledge any right within her dower lands to collect taxes or exert authority by her son, Enno III. Katarina was described as learned and intelligent by contemporaries, with an interest in literature and theology. She gave birth to eleven children, but two died in infancy. Katarina died in 1610, at age 71.
- June 6, 1654 – Queen Christina abdicates the Swedish throne and is succeeded by her cousin Charles X Gustav, in part because she wants to convert to Roman Catholicism.
- June 6, 1826 – Sarah Parker Remond born, African-American abolitionist, inspiring orator, American Anti-Slavery Society agent in England during Civil War, gathers support for anti-slavery cause and the Union Army, later moves to Italy and becomes a physician.
- June 6, 1841 – Eliza Orzeszkowa born, Polish author of novels, sketches, and dramas; Nobel Prize nominee in 1905; activist with the Positivism movement during the foreign Partitions of Poland; worked to improve social conditions in Poland; best known for her novel, Nad Niemnem (On the Niemen River).
- June 6, 1882 – Anna Airy born, English painter and etcher; one of the first women officially commissioned as a war artist, in 1918 by the Munitions Committee of the Imperial War Musuem (IWM) to create paintings representing typical scenes in munitions factories. These paintings were often done under hazardous conditions. While working at great speed to paint A Shell Forge at a National Projectile Factory, Hackney Marshes, London, the temperatures grew so high that her shoes were burnt off her feet. This painting was featured in the 2011-2012 Imperial War Museum’s exhibition Women War Artists. She also created paintings commissioned by Women’s Work Section of the IWM, the Canadian War Memorials Fund, and by the Ministry of Munitions during WWII. She was regarded as one of the leading women artists of her generation, and exhibited her work at the Royal Academy every year from 1905 through 1956. In 1908, she was elected to the Royal Society of Painters and Etchers. Airy died in 1964 at age 82.
- June 6, 1895 – A'Lelia Walker born, African American businesswoman and patron of the arts. She was the daughter of Madam C. J. Walker, founder of a cosmetics and hair care company making products for black women, who became one of the first Black millionaires in the U.S. After attending Knoxville College in Tennessee, Walker ran the East Coast operations of her mother’s company. She initiated marketing campaigns to promote the company, and became company president after her mother’s death in 1919. During the 1920s, she hosted many musicians, performers, writers, and artists in her Manhattan townhouse, as well as political figures and socialites. In October 1927, she converted a floor of her home into The Dark Tower, a cultural salon that became legendary as one of the gathering places of the era, a place where Harlem's talented artists socialized with their Greenwich Village counterparts as well as European and African royalty. She also founded the Harlem Debutantes Ball, supported local missionary work, and spoke at women’s days and other events. Walker died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1931 at the age of 46. Her daughter, Mae Walker, became the third- generation president of the company.
- June 6, 1898 – Ninette de Valois born, English ballerina, choreographer, and director, founder of The Royal Ballet, and the Royal Ballet School in Great Britain.
- June 6, 1901 – Joyce Anstruther born, English writer who published under the pen name Jan Struther, and also wrote hymn lyrics; contributor to Punch magazine, and wrote a fortnightly column for The London Times, where she created the character of Mrs. Miniver, who became so popular that the columns were published as a book in 1939, which inspired the screenwriters of the Academy Award-winning film Mrs. Miniver; her best-remembered hymn, written for children, is “Lord of All Hopefulness.”
- June 6, 1913 – In South Africa, an anti-pass campaign was born when about 700 women marched to the Bloemfontein City Council in the Orange Free State to petition the mayor. The Orange Free State was the only province in which passes were stringently enforced to control the movement of women residing and working in towns. The Campaign gained momentum and spread to other areas. 34 women were arrested and convicted for not having passes. The direct result of this campaign was the founding of the Bantu Women’s League under the leadership of Charlotte Manye Maxeke. The Bantu Women’s League was re-launched by the African National Congress as its Women’s League in the 1940s.
- June 6, 1925 – Maxine Kumin born, American poet and author, Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1981-1982).
- June 6, 1939 – Marian Wright Edelman born, lawyer and activist, founder and president of the Children’s Defense Fund.
- June 6, 1948 – Arlene J. Harris born, inventor and entrepreneur, “First Lady of Wireless” the holder of numerous wireless patents; co-founder of Cellular Business Systems Inc (CBSI), who guided development of the leading billing/CRM service bureau and the first automated cellular service activation systems, now used worldwide, and participated in development of intersystem roaming protocols. She founded Great Call in 2004 to offer simple-to-use cellular service to baby boomers and senior citizens, offering the Jitterbug cell phone. Harris was the first woman inductee to the Wireless Hall of Fame (2007).
- June 6, 1949 – Holly Near born, American singer-songwriter, feminist and peace activist. She became involved with anti-war groups in college in the late 1960s, and in 1970 she was cast in the Broadway musical Hair. Her song, “It Could Have Been Me,” was a response to the Kent State shootings that same year. In 1971, she was part of the Free the Army Tour, an anti-Vietnam War road show which performed for audiences of soldiers. In 1972, she founded Redwood Records to produce and promote politically conscious artists, but the independent label went out of business in the mid-1990s; she sang “We Are Gentle Angry People” at the 2004 March for Women’s Lives, and has also been a guest at the GALA conferences for LGBTQ choirs and choruses. Her autobiography is called Fire in the Rain, Singer in the Storm.
- June 6, 1950 – Chantal Akerman born, Belgian film director, artist, and professor of film at City College of New York; her best-known film is Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.
- June 6, 1951 – Marietta Giannakou born, Greek neuropsychologist at the University of Athens Faculty of Medicine before she entered politics; New Democracy politician since 1990; Minister for Health, Welfare and Social Security (1990-1991); Minister for National Education and Religious Affairs (2004-2007); Greek New Democracy member of the European Parliament (2009-2014).
- June 6, 1955 – Sandra Bernhard born, American comedian, singer, and LGBTQ rights activist; noted for her stand-up routines, and her comedy and singing albums.
- June 6, 1972 – Natalie Morales born, American television journalist at NBC; Today Show West Coast anchor (2016-2021).
- June 6, 1988 – Maria Alyokhina born, Russian musician and political activist, member of the punk rock group Pussy Riot. In 2012, she was convicted of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” for a performance in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. She has been recognized as a political prisoner by the Union of Solidarity with Political Prisoners. Amnesty International named her a prisoner of conscience due to “the severity of the response of the Russian authorities.” Alyokhina was close to the end of her two-year prison sentence when she and band member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova were freed in December 2013, under an amnesty which they saw as a propaganda stunt to improve Putin’s image ahead of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics.
- June 6, 2016 – U.S. media reports Hillary Rodham Clinton is the presumptive Democratic nominee for President, the first woman nominee of a major party in 240-years of U.S. history.
- June 6, 2019 – Former Vice President Joe Biden, the frontrunner in a crowded field of Democratic presidential candidates, announced that he now supports repealing the Hyde Amendment, a four-decade-old ban on using federal funding for most abortions. Biden’s campaign had said a day earlier that he still supported the measure, putting him at odds with the other leading 2020 Democratic candidates. Biden criticized Republican governors for “denying health care” to vulnerable Americans by refusing Medicaid expansion. “I can’t justify leaving millions of women without access to the care they need and the ability to exercise their constitutionally-protected right,” he said. “If I believe health care is a right, as I do, I can no longer support an amendment that makes that right dependent on someone’s ZIP code.”
- June 6, 2019 – Greece’s government rushed to revise legislation that redefines rape after unprecedented criticism from activists, human rights groups, and senior judicial officials. The law, part of a new penal code submitted to parliament by Alexis Tsipras’ administration only weeks before snap elections, had raised fears of convicted rapists being treated more leniently. The original law categorized some rapes as a misdemeanor rather than a felony, and all but ignored the issue of freely given consent, focusing instead on the use of violence, the resistance by the victim, and the threat posed to the victim’s life. Less than 24 hours after women’s groups had converged on parliament in protest, justice minister Michalis Kalogirou amended the bill, known as Article 336, clarifying that sex without consent would be considered rape and, as such, punishable under the law. “Whoever attempts a sexual act without the consent of the victim is punished by imprisonment of up to 10 years,” the revised law states. Eirini Gaitanou, head of the Greek office of Amnesty International, said, “This is a historic victory, not just for the campaigners who have fought long and hard for this day, but for all women in Greece. The newly amended law finally recognizes the simple truth that sex without consent is rape and makes it clear that physical violence is not required for the crime to be considered rape … [it] should give hope to people campaigning for consent-based laws wherever they are.” Jacqui Hunt, Europe director for the women’s group Equality Now, said, “It is very welcome that the government listened to the voices of women’s rights advocates in Greece and other experts to make changes to the law,” Hunt said. “Anything that lets potential perpetrators of sexual violence off the hook creates an environment for further violence and does a huge disservice to the women affected.” If passed, Greece will become only the tenth country in Europe to recognize sex without consent as rape in its criminal code. The attempt to roll back the definition of rape to base it on violence, rather than consent, was successfully defeated by women’s rights and human rights campaigners.
- June 6, 2020 – In Madrid, the reopening of Both Wise and Valiant, a joint exhibition by the Instituto Cervantes and Biblioteca Nacional de España was announced. The exhibition, which had opened in March, 2020, had to be closed because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Both Wise and Valiant celebrates the often overlooked women writers of Spain’s Golden Age. Curator Ana M Rodríguez-Rodríguez, hopes it will spark interest in some of the forgotten pathfinders of Spanish letters. A few of the featured writers – including St Teresa of Ávila and Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz (a nun born in Mexico to a Spanish father and a Mexican mother of Spanish descent) – are still widely read, but many others are not. Rodríguez-Rodríguez said, “Over the past few decades, specialists have been discovering these texts by women, but the general public don’t really know much about them and aren’t aware of the richness of these women’s writing.” Among the little-known writers is Catalina de Erauso, dubbed the ‘Nun Lieutenant.’ The curator describes de Erauso, “She was someone we’d doubtless call transgender today,” says the curator. “She was born a biological woman, went into a convent, escaped from it and ended up fleeing to the Americas. Once there, she passed herself off not just as a man but as a Spanish imperial soldier. She fought and lived as a man and had affairs with women.” Another woman featured in the exhibit is playwright Ana Caro, who wrote a play called Courage, Betrayal and A Woman Scorned. There’s a document showing a payment to made to her in 1638 for her work – two years before Aphra Behn, usually considered the first professional woman playwright, is believed to have been born.
- June 6, 2021 – Khalimat Taramova, the 22-year-old daughter of a prominent Chechen businessman, posted a video online: “Today is June 6, 2021. I, Khalimat Ayubovna Taramova, voluntarily left home to flee from regular beatings and threats. Please do not put me on the federal wanted list and do not disclose any information about my whereabouts, as those actions will pose a threat to my life. I was subjected to violence by my parents and by my husband. I was refused a divorce. I have been married for five years. And when anything goes wrong, they immediately beat me. At one point I thought that it was unsafe for me to stay here any longer because there was a threat to my life, not just violence. They warned me: ‘If you decide to run away, you will be found, brought back, and killed.” Taramova had fled her native Chechnya, and was sheltered by a women’s group in the neighboring republic of Dagestan. On June 10, police and security forces from Chechnya forced their way in and abducted her. Women’s rights activists warned she was at grave risk of becoming a victim of a so-called “honor’ killing, but authorities in Chechnya claimed they removed her in order “to prevent her abduction” by local human rights activists. On June 14, flanked by her father and her uncle, Taramova appeared on Grozny TV, the state television channel of the Chechen Republic, saying she’s “fine,” that her family is taking good care of her, that there had never been any abuse and hinted that she had probably been drugged because she was “in a fog” and could not remember much about going to Dagestan. Tanya Lokshina, associate director for Europe and central Asia at Human Rights Watch, said, “There’s no doubt that Taramova was there under duress. Those who file complaints with official authorities or speak out about abuse are routinely forced to take their allegations back and apologise on camera. This is one of the tactics used by Chechen authorities to suppress dissent.” Forced confessions or retractions have been commonly used in Chechnya since Ramzan Kadyrov became its leader in 2007, to intimidate people and spread propaganda suggesting that the republic is a utopia where there are no human rights violations. Kadyrov was appointed by Vladimir Putin, whom he idolizes.
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- June 7, 1757 – Georgiana Cavendish born as Georgiana Spencer, Duchess of Devonshire (1774-1806), English social leader, political organizer, style icon, author, and political activist. She was married at age 17 to one of the wealthiest and most eligible bachelors in England, but he was an emotionally reserved man with whom she had little in common. He made few changes in his bachelor way of life, devoting much of his time to playing cards at Brooks, the exclusive gentlemen’s club, and he continued to keep a series of mistresses, which left little time to spend with his wife. There was also much marital discord caused by a series of pregnancies which resulted in miscarriages or the birth of daughters instead of a male heir, until finally William George Spencer Cavendish was born in 1790. With the birth at last of a male heir, Georgiana was able to find consolation with a lover her own, Charles Grey, who later became Earl Grey (the tea is named for him), and Prime Minister of England (1830-1834). When Georgiana became pregnant during the affair, she was exiled to France, where she gave birth to her lover’s daughter, then was forced to give the child to Grey’s family. Throughout all these tribulations, she remained a leader of fashion, but also contributed to politics – as an active supporter of Charles Fox and the Whigs – and to science and literature, by holding a major salon where the most influential figures of the day would gather. Newspapers chronicled the details of what she wore, and all her activities. She was renowned for hosting dinners that became political meetings, and also cultivated brilliant radicals. She wrote both prose and poetry, some of which was published, including Emma, A Sentimental Novel; the anonymously published The Sylph; and the 30-stanza poem, The Passage of the Mountain of Saint Gothard. She played a major role, along with Thomas Beddoes, in establishing the Pneumatic Institution, a medical research facility in Bristol, and took an interest in scientific experiments. She died in 1806, at the age of 48. It was after Georgiana’s death that the Duke discovered the full extent of her mountain of gambling debts, which were not fully paid off until her son succeeded his father.
- June 7, 1831 – Amelia B. Edwards born, English novelist, journalist, travel writer, women’s rights activist, and Egyptologist; she was a co-founder of the Egypt Exploration Fund, which sponsored the early work of Flinders Petrie; noted for her Egyptian travelogue A Thousand Miles up the Nile.
- June 7, 1843 – Susan Elizabeth Blow born, American pioneer in kindergarten education. She founded the first public kindergarten in St. Louis, and ran it for 11 years without any pay. Blow worked hard to give young children a good start in their education. “If we can make children love intellectual effort,” she once wrote, “we shall prolong habits of study beyond school years.”
- June 7, 1848 – Dolores Jiménez y Muro born, Mexican schoolteacher, poet, and socialist activist, who became a revolutionary and supporter of General Emiliani Zapata during the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920). A collection of her poems written when she was in her 20s was published as Un rayo de luz (A Ray of Light). She was teaching in the rural school system until 1904, but was also published in newspapers like La Sombra de Zaragoza, and worked on La Potosina magazine. She was arrested and sent to prison for writing articles against the regime of Porfirio Diaz. In prison, she met Elisa Acuña Rossetti, Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza, and Inés Malváez, and they joined forces to publish a radical journal, Fiat Lux, which became the voice of the Mutual Society for Women. They called for better working conditions for women, and for labor strikes, and protested election fraud in 1910, so were again imprisoned. Jiménez continued to work from prison for land reforms and improving the economy, and for the rights of women and indigenous people. She campaigned to replace Diaz with Francisco Madero, and wrote a position paper for the Mexican Liberal Party, calling for fair wages, affordable housing, safer working conditions, and curbs on foreign investments. She was arrested again and wasn’t released until she staged a hunger strike. Disappointed by Madero, she switched her loyalty to Zapata, joining his forces and directing the newspaper La voz de Juárez. After yet another term in prison, she rejoined Zapata until his assassination in 1919. Jiménez worked in the Secretary of Education’s Cultural Missions program (1921-1924) and died in 1925.
- June 7, 1861 – Alice Moore Hubbard born, American feminist, educator, author, and general manager of the Roycroft reformist community and its Roycroft Inn, part of the American Arts and Crafts movement; known for Justinian and Theodora, Woman’s Work, and The Myth in Marriage. She and her husband, Elbert Hubbard, were aboard the RMS Lusitania was it was torpedoed by a German U-boat on May 7, 1915, and were among the 1,195 passengers and crew who were killed.
- June 7, 1861 – Robina Sinclair Nichol born in Scotland, New Zealand suffragist and photographer; her family emigrated to New Zealand in 1874 when she was 13 years old. She married in 1885, and became an enthusiastic amateur photographer. Her many photographs offer insights into life in New Zealand in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She was one of over 32,000 New Zealand women to sign the 1893 Women’s Suffrage Petition, which was submitted to Parliament in July. The individual sheets had been connected to form a roll which stretched over 890 feet (270 meters). On September 19, 1893, the governor, Lord Glasgow, signed an Electoral Act which made New Zealand the first self-governing country in the world where women had the right to vote in parliamentary elections. The 1893 petition has been on the UNESCO Memory of the World register since 1997. Nichol lived to the age of 81, and died in 1942.
- June 7, 1878 – Janet Ayer Fairbank born in Chicago, American author and an activist for women’s rights and progressive causes. She published her first novel, Home, in 1910. Fairbank wrote six more novels, a play, numerous short stories, and articles for magazines. She also served as president of the board of the Chicago Lying-In Hospital for over 20 years, and was an ardent campaigner for women’s right to vote. She died at age 73 in 1951.
- June 7, 1884 – Ester Claesson born, Swedish landscaping pioneer; considered the first Swedish woman landscape architect; after studying and working in Germany and Austria, she returned to Sweden, and soon started her own business, where she designed gardens to complement the work of Swedish architects like Ivar Tengborn, becoming the best-known and most-published landscape architect in Sweden during the early 20th century, but died at age 47 in 1931.
- June 7, 1896 – Vivien Kellems born, American woman industrialist/inventor, lecturer/political activist, co-inventor of a cable grip to pull and relieve strain on electrical cables. Enthusiastic supporter of voting reform, the Equal Rights Amendment, and abolishing the income tax.
- June 7, 1899 – Elizabeth Bowen born in Ireland, Anglo-Irish author; she moved to England at age 8, and was brought up by her aunts after her mother died in 1912. She became acquainted with the Bloomsbury Group, and was befriended by writer Rose Macaulay, who helped her find a publisher for her first book, Encounters; she worked for the British Ministry of Information during WWII. She is noted for her novel The Heat of the Day; her final book Eva Trout, or Changing Scenes won the 1969 James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
- June 7, 1899 – Carrie Nation, believing she was called by God, destroyed Dobson’s Saloon in Kiowa, Kansas with “smashers,” rocks wrapped in paper. She was a leader in the prohibition movement, and led women in smashing saloons with hatchets, in many “hatchetations.”
- June 7, 1909 – Virginia Apgar born, anesthesiologist, developed the Apgar Score to assess the health of newborns, increasing infant survival rates. A pioneer in anesthesiology who raised respect for the discipline; she warned use of some anesthetics during childbirth negatively affected infants; helped refocus March of Dimes from polio to birth defects.
- June 7, 1909 – Jessica Tandy born, award-winning actress, who appeared in over 100 stage productions and 60 films, 1920s to 1990s, including A Streetcar Named Desire (the original Blanche Dubois, on Broadway, 1948) and Driving Miss Daisy (the film, 1989).
- June 7, 1910 – Marion Post Wolcott born, documentary photographer for the Farm Security Administration (1938-1941); she usually traveled alone, and is notable for contrasting images of the poorest and the wealthiest during the Depression. Her FSA photographs are in the permanent collections of many major U.S. museums. She was honored with Society of Photographic Educator’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and the National Press Photographers’ Lifetime Achievement Award; her photographs were published in 1983 in FSA photographs / Marion Post Wolcott, and featured in other books covering photography of the period.
- June 7, 1917 – Gwendolyn Brooks born, poet, first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1950), and the first black woman to be named a Library of Congress Consultant in Poetry (1985-1986).
- June 7, 1925 – Ernestina Herrera de Noble born, prominent Argentine publisher, largest shareholder in the Grupo Clarín media conglomerate, and director of its flagship newspaper, Clarín. She was the first woman to be director of a mainstream newspaper in South America (1971-2017). She died at age 92.
- June 7, 1931 – Virginia McKenna born, British stage and film actress, author, and wildlife activist. Best known portraying for Joy Adamson in the film Born Free, which inspired her to become an activist for animal rights and protection of their natural habitat, and her work as a Trustee of the Born Free Foundation. She is also a Patron of Cinnamon Trust, a charity that helps elderly people keep their pets. Her autobiography, The Life in My Years, was published in 2004.
- June 7, 1944 – Annette Lü born, Taiwanese Democratic Progressive Party politician and feminist; she was elected to the Legislative Yuan (1993-1996); Magistrate of Taoyuan County (1997-2000); Vice President of the Republic of China (2000-2008); author of Xin Nüxing Zhuyi (New Feminism) and the novel These Three Women, written while she was in prison. After a 1979 International Human Rights Day rally held by the Taiwanese democracy movement, she and all the other speakers were arrested for violent sedition. Amnesty International named her as a prisoner of conscience, and pressure both internationally and in Taiwan secured her release after 5½ years.
- June 7, 1954 – Louise Erdrich born, Ojibwe novelist, poet, and children’s book author, enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, a band of Anishinaabe (aka Ojibwe and Chippewa). Considered one of the most significant writers of the second wave of the Native American Renaissance. Her first novel, The Plague of Doves, was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She won the 2012 National Book Award for Fiction for her novel The Round House. Erdich has also published three collections of poetry: Jacklight; Baptism of Desire; and Original Fire. She owns Birchbark Books, an independent bookstore in Minneapolis which focuses on Native American literature.
- June 7, 1965 – The U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 7-2 decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, cutting down state laws that made use of birth control by anyone, including married couples, illegal, citing the “right to marital privacy” in deciding whether or when to have a child, which became the basis for extending the right to privacy in later reproductive rights decisions, including Roe v. Wade.
- June 7, 1968 – Women sewing machinists at Ford Motor Company Limited’s Dagenham plant in London go out on strike; Barbara Castle, the Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity in Harold Wilson’s government, intervenes and the strike ends three weeks later, after a deal that immediately increases their rate of pay to 8% below that of men, to rise to the same category B rate as the men the following year. This had repercussions in the U.S. as well: the international media attention to the Dagenham strike contributed to the passage of the U.S. Equal Pay Act of 1970.
- June 7, 1979 – Anne C. McClain born, U.S. Army Lt. Colonel, engineer, and NASA astronaut since 2015; flight engineer for Expedition 58/59 to the International Space Station (December 2018-June 2019). In December, 2020, McClain was announced as one of NASA’s Artemis astronauts, a human spaceflight program with the goal of returning humans to the Moon by 2025.
- June 7, 2000 – The UN Population Fund issued a report that shows conditions for women have improved somewhat since the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, when 179 countries met and pledged to do more for their women citizens. Eight African nations have banned female genital mutilation. Venezuela’s new constitution includes sexual and reproductive rights, and steps toward gender equality. Japan approved sale of low-dosage oral contraceptives. Legislation was passed in Mexico and Peru to improve access to reproductive health services. Cambodia enacted far-reaching abortion legislation. Albania, Burkina Faso, Fiji, Madagascar, Poland, and the Sudan have all adopted measures to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex. However, the report emphasized “what the costs of inequality are, what has been kept in place in the past, and what’s being done to address it now,” said Stan Bernstein, a senior research adviser with the fund. He called continuing discrimination against women “a massive violation of human rights that takes various forms around the globe.” The report shows that a 1% increase in a country’s female secondary schooling would result in a 0.3% increase in national economic growth. The report also cites statistics on abuse, illness, early deaths, abortions, and degradation. One in three women will experience violence in her lifetime – most often by someone she knows. Two million girls under age 15 are forced into the sex trade every year. Complications from pregnancy and childbirth kill 500,000 women a year. Stillbirths or newborn deaths total an estimated 8 million yearly, mostly due to lack of obstetric care. About a third of all pregnancies each year, some 80 million, are unintended or unwanted. About 20 million unsafe abortions occur each year, causing 78,000 maternal deaths, and 25% of these unsafe procedures are on girls between ages 15 and 19. "Abused women tend not to use family planning services ... for fear of reprisal from husbands," the report states, citing a Ghana study in which "close to half of all women and 43 percent of men said a man was justified in beating his wife if she used contraceptives without his expressed consent." Abused women participants in focus groups in Peru and Mexico said they did not discuss birth control with their husbands, fearing a violent reaction. The resistance to contraception, the report said, "takes a tremendous toll, both physical and emotional, and causes immense damage to a woman's reproductive health." Unsafe abortions, unwanted pregnancies, frequent high-risk pregnancies, and sexually transmitted diseases are among the results.
- June 7, 2017 – In the UK, Nimco Ali, the Women’s Equality Party’s candidate to represent Hornsey and Wood Green in Parliament, received a letter containing a death threat and racist abuse, which was signed “Jo Cox.” Jo Cox was a Labour MP who was murdered in June 2016 by a far-right fanatic, because of her opposition to Britain leaving the European Union. Ali, who is a prominent campaigner against female genital mutilation (FGM), told reporters that she had been the target of online abuse for weeks. “They are targeting me because I am young, black and loud, I guess – but I am standing for good things. I want the world to be a better place. We have to show there is more love in the world than hate.” Workers in the party’s headquarters also received threats, including a phone call from a man who told them he was 10 minutes away. When the woman who answered the phone said she would call police, she was told he wasn’t scared of the police and he could do what he wanted. The Women’s Equality Party was founded in 2015 by Catherine Mayer and Sandi Toksvig. Mayer said the police had advised upgrading their phone security system, and she issued a statement, “The contemptible attempts to frighten @WEP_UK into silence *do* frighten us but won’t silence us. They strengthen our resolve. This is what happens to women who dare to take a little space for themselves. This is one reason there are far too few women in politics.” She added, “Two of [the party’s] core goals are to increase female representation and end violence against women & girls. This illustrates how vital they are.”
- June 7, 2020 – In the UK, Black, Asian, and minority ethnic women are suffering greater financial and psychological consequences from the pandemic than their white counterparts, and are facing a higher risk of dying from the Covid-19. Data collected by Survation for the Fawcett Society shows over four out of ten Black, Asian, and minority women said they will struggle to make ends meet through the summer months, are experiencing high anxiety about having to go out of work, and 45% say they are struggling with greater demands on their time for domestic work and caregiving. Over half of disabled or retired minority women said they were unsure where to turn to for help a result of the pandemic.
- June 7, 2021 – In an interview for UNWomen, Joanita Babirye of Uganda, the co-founder of Girls for Climate Justice, said, “Empowering young women and girls to become climate leaders is an essential part of provoking action. Women and girls should be able to demand climate justice, but this is only possible when they are equipped with the tools and knowledge to hold everyone accountable and to break the barriers that are hindering their access to resources. For me, the transformation needed is to make women and girls fully aware of the issues and leaders of the solutions.”
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- June 8, 1858 – Charlotte Angas Scott born, British mathematician; one of first English women to obtain a doctorate in mathematics. Thanks to rigorous home schooling, she won a scholarship (1876) to Hitchin College (later renamed Girton College), the first English college to offer a post secondary program for women. She competed in the “Tripos” final examinations (1880) offered at Cambridge. Mastery of Tripos exams qualified her to receive a bachelor's degree with honors, previously only awarded to male Cambridge students. Though she ranked 8th in test scores, she was not allowed at awards ceremony, solely because she was female. Undeterred, she got a Bachelor of Science degree (1882), then doctorate (1885), both with First Class ratings, from University of London – Cambridge didn’t award degrees to women until 1948. Her snubbing led to eligibility of all resident Cambridge women to take examinations and to have their names announced publicly with the men. Scott taught at Bryn Mawr in the U.S., establishing their undergraduate and graduate programs in mathematics. She published An Introductory Account of Certain Modern Ideas and Methods in Plane Analytical Geometry (1894), which is still widely used. She was the first, and only, woman on the inaugural Council of the American Mathematical Society (1894), and became CAMS Vice President in 1905.
- June 8, 1860 – Alicia Boole Stott born, Irish-English mathematician known for her models of three-dimensional geometric figures, coined “polytope” for a convex solid in four (or more) dimensions.
- June 8, 1871 – Luisa Tetrazzini born, Italian operatic soprano; Chicken Tetrazzini is named for her, possibly by Ernest Arbogast, chef at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel.
- June 8, 1900 – Lena Baker born, to an African American sharecropper family in Cuthbert Georgia. A mother of three children, she was hired by Ernest Knight, a white employer, who sexually assaulted her multiple times and held her imprisoned for days at a time. Knight’s son and several townspeople disliked their “relationship” and tried to end it by threatening her. One night in 1944, Baker was trying to escape from Knight when he threatened her with an iron bar, and then they struggled over his pistol. Baker shot and killed him. She reported the incident immediately to the coroner, who was her former employer, saying she had acted in self-defense. Lena Baker was charged with capital murder. Judge William “Two Gun” Worrill, who kept a pair of pistols in view on his judicial bench, presided over her trial. The all-white, all-male jury convicted her of capital murder by the end of the first day of the trial. After Baker’s court-appointed counsel filed an appeal, he dropped her as a client. Governor Ellis Arnall granted Baker a 60-day reprieve so that the Board of Pardons and Parole could review the case, but in January 1945 it denied Baker clemency. She was transferred to Georgia State Prison at Reidsville on February 23, 1945. Her last words before her execution were: “What I done, I did in self-defense, or I would have been killed myself. Where I was I could not overcome it. God has forgiven me. I have nothing against anyone. I picked cotton for Mr. Pritchett, and he has been good to me. I am ready to go. I am one in the number. I am ready to meet my God. I have a very strong conscience.” On March 5, 1945, she became the only woman in Georgia executed by electrocution. In 2005, sixty years after her execution, the state of Georgia granted Baker a full and unconditional pardon.
- June 8, 1900 – Estelle Griswold born, birth control advocate and pioneer, defendant in the Supreme Court case Griswold v. Connecticut which legalized access to contraception for married couples in 1965.
- June 8, 1903 – Jessie Bernard born, sociologist, feminist critic and author of The Paradox of the Happy Marriage (1971), and The Female World (1981).
- June 8, 1903 – Marguerite Yourcenar born in Belgium, French novelist and essayist; Memoirs of Hadrian; winner of the Prix Femina and the Erasmus Prize, the first woman elected to the Académie Française, in 1980. The Yourcenar Prize is named in her honor.
- June 8, 1912 – Wilhelmina Barns-Graham born, one of the foremost British abstract painters; she was a co-founder of the influential Penwith Society of Arts. In 1942, Barns-Graham became a member of the Newlyn Society of Artists, exhibiting with them every year thereafter, and also joined the St. Ives Society of Artists.
- June 8, 1920 – Gwen Harwood born in Tasmania, one of Australia’s finest poets whose early work was published under various pseudonyms, including Walter Lehmann, Francis Geyer, and Miriam Stone; librettist for over a dozen works by prominent Australian composers; she won many awards for her poetry, including the 1977 Robert Frost Medallion; The Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize was created in her memory in 1996.
- June 8, 1929 – Margaret Bondfield becomes Minister of Labour, the first woman appointed to a Cabinet position in the United Kingdom.
- June 8, 1933 – Joan Rivers born as Joan Alexandra Molinsky, American comedian, writer, producer, actress and TV host. She was the first woman to host (1986-1987) a late night talk show, The Late Show with Joan Rivers, and then hosted The Joan Rivers Show (1989-1993), for which she won the 1990 Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Talk Show Host. She was an activist for HID/AIDS research, and for organizations which delivered meals to HID/AIDS patients. Rivers was also an Honorary Director of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, a supporter of Guide Dogs for the Blind, Habitat for Humanity, Human Rights Campaign, and many Jewish charities. She died in 2014 at age 81.
- June 8, 1937 – Gillian Clarke born, Welsh poet, playwright, Welsh-speaker and translator; co-founder in 1990 of Tŷ Newydd, the National Writing Centre of Wales, which offers residential creative writing, courses in Welsh and English, retreats, seminars and forums. She held the post of National Poet of Wales (2008-2016), and in 2010 became the second Welsh poet to be awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. In 2011 she was made a member of the Gorsedd of Bards, and in 2012 she received the Wilfred Owen Association Poetry award.
- June 8, 1947 – Sara Paretsky born, American novelist and author of detective fiction, best known for her V.I. Warshawski series.
- June 8, 1949 – Helen Keller and Dorothy Parker are among many prominent people named in an FBI report which claimed they were members of the Communist Party. Keller was an outspoken Socialist and a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, who campaigned for woman’s suffrage, labor rights, and antimilitarism. Parker was an activist, beginning in the 1920s, and was arrested for protesting the pending executions of Sacco and Vanzetti. She was a vocal advocate for civil liberties during the 1930s and 1940s, and was a founder of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, which the FBI later declared was a Communist Front, so she was put on the Hollywood blacklist, which ended her employment as a screenplay writer.
- June 8, 1953 – U.S. Supreme Court rules unanimously in District of Columbia v. John R. Thompson Co. Inc., a lawsuit spearheaded by Mary Church Terrell against a segregated restaurant in Washington DC, that its policy of segregation is illegal, upholding laws passed in the District of Columbia in 1872 and 1873 prohibiting segregation in public places, which, although never enforced for decades, were still on the books in 1953.
- June 8, 1956 – LaDonna Brave Bull Allard born, Native American Dakota and Lakota historian, genealogist, and activist in the water protector movement. After college, she went to work for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe as the cultural resource planner. Later, she helped create the Standing Rock Tribal Historic Preservation Office and Tourism Office, where she was instrumental in establishing the Standing Rock Scenic Byway which passes many historic sites, and also helped oversee improvements to Sitting Bull's Fort Yates grave site after the land was repatriated to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in 2007. In April 2016, she was one of the founders of the Sacred Stone Camp, the first resistance camp of the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, aimed at halting the Dakota Access Pipeline near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota. In 2020, Brave Bull Allard was diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer and underwent brain surgery. She died at age 64 in April, 2021.
- June 8, 1958 – Louise Richardson born, Irish political scientist, specialist in the study of terrorism; Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford since 2016; Principal and vice-Chancellor of the University of St Andrews (2009-2015), the first woman and first Roman Catholic in modern times to hold the position; executive dean of the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study (2001-2008); author of What Terrorists Want, and When Allies Differ: Anglo-American Relations in the Suez and Falkland Crises.
- June 8, 1961 – Mary Bonauto born, American lawyer and civil rights advocate and activist in the struggle to eradicate discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. She has been working with GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) since 1990. Bonauto was one of the leaders who worked with the Maine legislature to pass a same-sex marriage law, then defended it at the ballot in a narrow loss during the 2009 election campaign. But in the 2012 election, Maine voters approved the measure, making it the first state to allow same-sex marriage licenses via ballot vote. Bonauto is best known for being lead counsel in the case Goodridge v. Department of Public Health which made Massachusetts the first state in which same-sex couples could marry in 2004. She is also responsible for leading the first strategic challenges to section three of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).
- June 8, 1963 – Karen Kingsbury born, American novelist and newspaper writer. She was a sports writer for the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Daily News. Best known for Baxter Family series.
- June 8, 1970 – Gabrielle Giffords born, American politician and gun control advocate; U.S. House of Representatives (Democrat-Arizona, 2007-2012), the third woman to be elected to the U.S. Congress from Arizona; in January 2011, she was shot in the head at a constituent meeting by a lone gunman, but survived with a severe brain injury. The gunman shot 24 other people, and six of them died. After multiple surgeries and intensive rehabilitation surgery, she was still struggling with language, had lost 50% of her vision in both eyes and her right arm was paralyzed. She resigned from Congress in January 2012. She and her husband Mark Kelly founded the political action committee called Americans for Responsible Solutions to promote gun-control legislation to keep firearms out of the hands of dangerous people like criminals, terrorists, and the mentally ill, and limiting sale of assault weapons and high-capacity gun magazines.
- June 8, 1976 – Catherine McKinnell born, British Labour politician, member of Parliament for Newcastle upon Tyne North since 2010; prominent campaigner for the Women Against State Pension Inequality.
- June 8, 1981 – Sara Watkins born, American fiddler and singer-songwriter. She also plays the ukulele, the guitar, and percussion. She formed the progressive bluegrass group Nickel Creek in 1989 with her brother Sean and mandolin-player Chris Thile. Nickel Creek has released five studio albums, one compilation album, and seven singles. Watkins also released three solo albums. Since 2014, she has been a member of the band I’m With Her, which won a Grammy for Best American Roots Song for “Call My Name.”
- June 8, 2009 – American journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling were found guilty of illegally entering North Korea to produce and broadcast a documentary “slandering the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea”– the official name of North Korea –and sentenced to 12 years of hard labor. The journalists said they were in the border region of China and North Korea to report on the trafficking of women, accompanied by American cameraman Mitch Koss and an ethnic Korean citizen of China who was serving as their guide, when they were arrested by two Korean People’s Army soldiers. Koss and the guide eluded the soldiers, but were detained by officers of China’s Public Security Bureau. Koss quickly departed China. North Korean leader Kim Jong-il pardoned Lee and Ling on August 5, 2009, the day after former President Bill Clinton arrived in North Korea on a publically unannounced visit.
- June 8, 2018 – On World Ocean Day, members of the Council of Women World Leaders joined Friends of Ocean Action in calling on their network of international organizations, collaborators, and partners for action to conserve the world’s ocean and marine resources. “If you want to save the Ocean, make women part of the solution.” Human activities and global warming are threatening our largest life-sustaining ecosystem, which disproportionally affects women and girls in developing countries. Inclusion of women in global leadership positions drives innovative solutions and creativity that benefits entire communities. Greater gender diversity is needed in the global fight for a healthier ocean and for the sustainable use of oceans, and is one of the targets of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
- June 8, 2020 – Natasha Cloud, a guard for the Washington Mystics, became the first woman basketball player to sign a shoe deal with Converse since its relaunch of the Converse Hoops brand. After the killing of George Floyd, she wrote an article for The Player’s Tribune May 2020 issue entitled Your Silence is a Knee on My Neck, “... to send a message to the so-called ‘neutral’ people out there. It’s to tell them that we’re changing up the definitions of some of these words they’ve been hiding behind. It’s to tell them that ‘seeing both sides’ means having blood on their hands—and ‘opting out’ means leaving innocent people to die. It’s to tell them that neutrality about black lives might as well be murder. It’s to tell them that their silence is the knee on George Floyd’s neck.” Cloud’s essay quickly went viral as Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality and institutionalized racism took to the streets in all 50 states. While her endorsement deal with Converse was already done and its announcement was put on hold as the company acknowledged the infinitely more important events taking place all around the country, the sneaker giant still took notice of her very public contribution to the current wave of activism. “Cloud is known for extending her influence through leadership efforts that place emphasis on being a voice for the voiceless, specifically using her platform to speak out against the racial injustices that are killing Black people in America, while also advocating for equality for women and the LGBTQ+ community and working to guide youth in her communities ... We look forward to amplifying her voice for the causes she believes in and will keep you updated on our community efforts following our recent commitment.”
- June 8, 2021 – Apple had paid a multi-million dollar settlement to an Oregon woman because iPhone repair technicians uploaded explicit images and videos to the internet from her phone when she sent it in for repair. Legal filings revealed the unnamed woman sent her iPhone in January, 2016, to an Apple-approved repair contractor called Pegatron Technology Service in California. Pegatron technicians uploaded “extremely personal and private material” to the woman’s Facebook account and other internet locations, the documents said. The videos were uploaded to appear as though the woman herself had shared them on purpose, according to the documents, causing the woman “severe emotional distress.” She was unaware of the postings until friends saw the videos and images on Facebook and told her. The woman sued Apple and eventually settled with the company for a multi-million dollar sum. But Apple was never directly named in the lawsuit in an effort to keep the matter confidential. The incident only became public when attorneys in a newer, unrelated case involving Apple and Pegatron referenced the previous case in their legal filings, saying the company in the previous case was “clearly Apple.” An Apple spokesperson responded to inquiries by the press, “We take the privacy and security of our customers’ data extremely seriously and have a number of protocols in place to ensure data is protected throughout the repair process … When we learned of this egregious violation of our policies at one of our vendors in 2016, we took immediate action and have since continued to strengthen our vendor protocols.”
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Sources
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There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
― Hamlet, Act I, scene 5
The Gender-Shifting Clownfish
Clownfish live within a strict hierarchy, where each school is headed by a female and seconded by a submissive male with whom she mates. The other adult fish in the school are all male, but clownfish are born hermaphrodites, becoming male by maturity.
However, when the dominant female dies, her mate takes her place and changes his sex to female.
The hierarchy is also maintained within the school through body mass. The female is the largest of the school, followed by her second and so on. Once the second takes the deceased female’s role, he expands to her size. The other fish in the school also grow according to their new hierarchal positions.
A rough estimate of the number of hermaphroditic animal species is 65,000. The percentage of animal species that are hermaphroditic is about 33% of species other than insects.
One species of fungi, Schizophyllum commune, a white, fan-shaped mushroom, has over 23,000 different sexual identities, a result of widespread differentiation in the genetic locations that govern its sexual behavior.