June 2023 – Women Trailblazers and Activists – 6-16 thru 6-23

June is Gay and Lesbian Pride Month
aka LGBTQ+ Pride Month

“When you are doing something
that is right, you just do it and take
care … Someone has to do this.”
– Alice Nkom,
Cameroonian civil rights lawyer,
defender of victims of Cameroon’s
harsh laws against homosexuality
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WOW2 is a four-times-a-month sister blog
to This Week in the War on Women.
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“It takes no compromise to give people
their rights … it takes no money to respect
the individual. It takes no political deal
to give people freedom. It takes no
survey to remove repression.”
– Harvey Milk
assassinated San Francisco
gay rights activist

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“There will not be a magic
day when we wake up and
it’s now okay to express ourselves
publicly. We make that day by
doing things publicly until it’s
simply the way things are.”
– Tammy Baldwin,
first openly gay U.S. Senator
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The purpose of WOW2 is to learn about and honor women of achievement, including many who’ve been ignored or marginalized in most of the history books.

These trailblazers have a lot to teach us about persistence in the face of overwhelming odds. I hope you will find reclaiming our past as much of an inspiration as I do.

THIS WEEK IN THE WAR ON WOMEN
has posted, so be sure to go there next, and
catch up on the latest dispatches from the frontlines.

Many, many thanks to libera nos, intrepid Assistant Editor of WOW2. Any remaining mistakes are either mine, or uncaught computer glitches in transferring the data from his emails to DK5. And much thanks to wow2lib, WOW2’s Librarian Emeritus.

**Trailblazing Women and Events in Our History**

_{Note: All images and audios are below the person or event to which they refer.}

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June 16, 1644 – Princess Henrietta of England born, Duchess of Orléans, sister of King Charles II. A negotiator of the 1670 Secret Treaty of Dover between England and France: Charles promises to support French policy in Europe in return for a French subsidy freeing him from financial dependence on Parliament, plus the support of 6,000 French troops, if needed, should he declare himself a Roman Catholic. A very dangerous intrigue for an English monarch and his sister, especially for children of the executed Charles I. The public Treaty of Dover, without these incendiary details, was concluded later that year. After returning to France from the negotiations, Henrietta developed severe gastric distress, and died. Poisoning was rumoured, but cause of death in an autopsy report was “cholera morbus caused by heated bile” – probably what is now called gastroenteritis.

June 16, 1738 – Mary Katherine Goddard born, daughter of a Connecticut postmaster; American publisher, printer, and bookseller. Her brother William founded a patriot newspaper, the Maryland Journal, in Baltimore. In 1774, she took over as the Journal’s publisher/printer while he traveled, promoting his Constitutional Post. Goddard was also America’s first woman postmaster (1775-1789, in Baltimore). In 1777, Congress she became the second printer of the Declaration of Independence. Her copies were the first to list all of the signer’s names (now called the Goddard Broadside). At the time, this would likely have been treason to the British Crown. Ironically, in 1789, under the new U.S. Constitution, the Postmaster General removed her from her postmaster position, using her gender as an excuse to replace her with one of his cronies. That year, she opened a bookstore in Baltimore, almost certainly the first run by a woman proprietor in the U.S.

June 16, 1829 – Bessie Rayner Parkes born, English poet, essayist, journalist, prominent feminist, and women’s rights advocate in Victorian England. She and Barbara Smith Bodichon campaigned for the Married Women’s Property Act 1870, ending a husband’s ownership of the money his wife earned, giving wives the right to inherit property. Parker was principal editor of England’s first feminist periodical, the English Woman’s Journal, published monthly (1858-1964). Though short-lived, the Journal led to many other women’s ventures, including the Society for the Promotion of the Employment of Women; the Law-Copying Office; the Langham Place Group, where women gathered informally to talk; and the Victoria Printing Press (entirely staffed by women) started by Parkes in 1860. In 1866, Parkes and Bodichon formed the first Woman’s Suffrage Committee. Their petition, presented to the House of Commons, launched the campaign for voting rights. Parkes wrote poetry, essays, biography, memoirs, travelogues, and works for children, dozens of articles, and an effective pamphlet on women’s rights. She died in 1925, at the age of 95.

June 16, 1892 – Jennie Grossinger born in Galicia, came to America at age eight. A highly successful hotelier and philanthropist, she ran Grossinger’s, her family’s elegant Catskills resort, the first resort to use artificial snow (1952), and successfully circumvented anti-Jewish restrictive covenants of the time.

June 16, 1902 – Barbara McClintock born, American cytogeneticist and major figure in genetics; developed maize cytogenetics in the 1940s and 1950s. Her theory that genes are transposable on and between chromosomes was confirmed by other scientists by the 1980s. Won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1983, the first woman to win an unshared Nobel Prize.

June 16, 1915 – The British Women’s Institute (BWI) founded, the largest women’s volunteer organization in the UK.

June 16, 1915 – Lucy Davidowicz born Lucy Schildkret, American historian, prominent scholar of Jewish history and the Holocaust. U.S.-born daughter of Polish immigrants, she moved to Poland in 1938 to work at the Yiddish Scientific Institute, returning home just weeks before WWII broke out in Europe. In 1946, she became an aid worker for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee among Jewish survivors in Europe’s Displaced Persons camps.

June 16, 1915 – Marga Faulstich born, German glass chemist; worked for Schott’s for 44 years, and was its first woman executive. Faulstich worked on over 300 types of optical glass, especially for microscopes and binoculars. Forty patents are registered in her name.

June 16, 1917 – Katharine “Kay” Graham born, American publisher; became leader of her family’s newspaper, The Washington Post, after her husband’s suicide in 1963, the first woman publisher of a major American newspaper. Assumed the title of president by 1967, then publisher (1969-1979), then board chair (1973-1991). Won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for her memoir Personal History.

June 16, 1934 – Dame Eileen Atkins born, English actress and screenwriter; three-time Olivier Award winner: Best Supporting Performance (for multiple roles) in 1988; Best Actress in 1999 for The Unexpected Man; Best Actress in 2004 for Honour. Atkins joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1957, and appeared on stage in London, on Broadway, and at the Edinburgh Festival. Co-creator with Jean March of TV dramas Upstairs, Downstairs and The House of Elliot. Also wrote the screenplay for 1997’s Mrs. Dalloway, starring Vanessa Redgrave. Atkins was created a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2001.

June 16, 1938 – Joyce Carol Oates born, American author of over 40 novels, plus plays, novellas, short stories, and poetry; 1969 National Book Award for them, and a 2010 National Humanities Medal.

June 16, 1945 – Lucienne Robillard born, Canadian Liberal politician and social worker; Quebec’s Liberal Party President(since 2010); Liberal Party deputy leader in the House of Commons (2006-2008); Canadian MP (1995-2008).

June 16, 1946 – Karen Dunnell born, British medical sociologist and civil servant; National Statistician and CEO of the UK Office for National Statistics (2005-2009); inaugural CEO of the UK Statistics Authority in 2008; Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society; appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the Bath in 2009.

June 16, 1946 – Jodi Rell born, Republican politician; Connecticut governor (2004-2004), the state’s second woman governor, after Ella Grasso. She was pro-choice and supported embryonic stem-cell research. Rell also supported Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal’s lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education over the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which requires states to pay for standardized testing every school year, instead of every other year, believing funding the public school budget in other areas was more effective.

June 16, 1947 – Ellen Bass born, American poet and co-author of The Courage to Heal. Co-founder of the Survivors Healing Center in Santa Cruz, California, a non-profit organization offering services to survivors of child sexual abuse. Her poetry collections include Mules of Love; Like a Beggar; and Indigo.

June 16, 1955 – Grete Faremo born, Norwegian politician, civil servant, and lawyer; UN Office for Project Services Executive Director (2014-2022); Norwegian Minister of Justice (1992-1996 and 2011-2013; Minister of Defence (2009-2011); Minister of International Aid (1990-1992); Norwegian MP (1993-1997).

June 16, 1957 – Leeona Dorrian born, Lady Dorrian since 2005; since 2016, first woman Lord Justice Clerk, second most senior judicial post in Scotland; Senator of the College of Justice since 2005.

June 16, 1963 – Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova becomes the first woman in space when she pilots Vostok 6.

June 16, 1969 – Sharmishta Chakrabarti, Baroness Chakrabarti, born in London to Bengali parents; British Labour Party politician, feminist, civil liberties and human rights advocate; member of the House of Lords since 2016; member of the UK Privy Council since 2018.

June 16, 1987 – Ali Stroker born, American actress, and singer; a car accident at age two left her paralyzed from the waist down. In 2015, she became the first actor using a wheelchair to appear on a Broadway stage. She played the role of Anna in Deaf West Theatre’s revival of Spring Awakening. In 2019, she played Ado Annie in a revival of Oklahoma! at Broadway’s Circle in the Square Theatre, the first person with a disability to be nominated for and win a Tony Award, for Best Featured Actress in a Musical.

June 16, 2012 – Pilot and astronaut Liu Yang becomes the first Chinese woman in space as a crew member of the Shenzhou 9 mission.

June 16, 2016 – Jo Cox, British Labour MP was assassinated outside a meeting with constituents by a 52-year-old man with a history of psychiatric problems and links to a neo-Nazi group, who shouted “Britain first!” as he shot her three times, then stabbed her repeatedly. She was known for work on women’s issues, support for refugees, and opposition to Brexit. Bernard Kenney, a 77-year-old retired miner, was stabbed in the stomach while trying to stop her attacker. Kenney survived, and was honored with the George Medal, but died two years later. Her killer was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment with a whole life order (no possibility of parole).

June 16, 2019 – The Guardian newspaper reported a bizarre scheme put forward by Nottinghamshire Police to decrease the number of domestic violence deaths by providing victims of domestic abuse with blunt-ended knives for their kitchens, making it harder for their violent partners to stab them to death. Paddy Tipping, Nottingham police and crime commissioner, said the blunt knives project “… is an excellent initiative. Some research shows that women are attacked around 19 times before they leave their home.” But Jessica Eaton, founder of Victim Focus, retorted, “I work with women who have been stabbed with forks … You could be attacked with anything.” On average, two women a week are killed by a current or former partner in England and Wales alone. Women have been murdered or severely injured by intimate partners with fists, stones, multi-tools, axes, scissors, cricket bats, boiling water, electrical cords – and knives used to cut the victim’s throat rather than stabbing her. Nottinghamshire Police works with Women’s Aid to help domestic abuse victims, but the charity declined to comment when contacted.

June 16, 2020 – Reni Eddo-Lodge became the first black author to reach the overall #1 spot in the UK official book charts since Nielsen Bookscan began keeping book sales records in 2001. Her book, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, evolved out of Eddo-Lodge’s popular blog, and had already reached #1 on the non-fiction paperback charts. She tweeted: “Feels absolutely wild to have broken this record. My work stands on the shoulders of so many black British literary giants – Bernadine Evaristo, Benjamin Zephaniah, Zadie Smith, Andrea Levy, Stella Dadzie, Stuart Hall, Linton K Johnson, Jackie Kay, Gary Younge – to name a few.” In the same week as Eddo-Lodge reached the best-seller pinnacle, publisher Sharmaine Lovegrove, journalist Afua Hirsch, and author Nels Abbey formed the Black Writers’ Guild, calling for sweeping change across the publishing industry to address deep-rooted racial inequalities.

June 16, 2021 – A Human Rights Watch (HRW) report on sex crime prosecutions for illegal filming and online sexual abuse in South Korea found an eleven-fold increase in digital sex crimes between 2008 and 2017. The report, My Life is Not Your Porn: Digital Sex Crimes in South Korea, said molka – using hidden cameras to film or share explicit images of women without their consent – caused victims to consider quitting their jobs, leaving the country, or even suicide. Encounters with unsympathetic police and courts made their trauma worse. HRW called for harsher penalties, and educating men and boys about the dangers of consuming abusive images online. “Digital sex crimes have become so common, and so feared, in South Korea that they are affecting the quality of life of all women and girls,” said Heather Barr, HRW’s Women’s Rights Division associate director.

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June 17, 1610 – Birgitte Thott born, Danish scholar, writer, early feminist and advocate for educating women. Fluent and literate in her main area of study, Latin, as well as English, French, German, and Hebrew, she made translations into Danish, including the first Danish translation of the 1,000-page Philologus by Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca.

June 17, 1818 – Sophie of Württemberg born, Queen Consort of the Netherlands. Her marriage to William, Prince of Orange, was unhappy. She was his intellectual superior, and he openly carried on frequent affairs. Though both wanted a divorce, their position made it impossible, so when he succeeded to the throne as King William III after his father’s death in 1849, a separation was arranged. He had full custody of their eldest son as heir to the throne, but she gained custody of their younger son. Living in a separate palace, she traveled frequently, but still carried out her public duties as queen. She corresponded with notable intellectuals of her day, and supported several charities, especially for protecting animals, construction of public parks, and education of the mentally challenged. She also supported the women’s rights movement from its beginning in the Netherlands, and was the protector of Arbeld Adelt (“labour is ennobling”), the first nationwide Dutch women’s organization, founded in 1871 to advocate for more access to education and professions in which women could support themselves. Sophie was dubbed “la reine rouge” (the red queen) because of her left-leaning political opinions, interest in the sciences, non-dogmatic views on religion, support for progressive development, and her disdain for etiquette. She died at age 58, and was buried at her request in her wedding dress, declaring her life had ended on the day she was married.

June 17, 1865 – Susan La Flesche Picotte born, of the Omaha tribe, first Native American physician (1889); fought tuberculosis and alcoholism on the reservation; campaigned for land rights and for a reservation hospital (1913), later named for her.

June 17, 1869 – Flora Finch born in England, American comedian, stage and film actress, producer, and film company owner. Her family, music hall performers, moved to the U.S., where she worked from childhood in theatre and on the vaudeville circuit. In her 30s, Finch began starring in over 300 silent films, with co-stars like Fatty Arbuckle, Mack Sennett, and Charlie Chaplin. She worked at Vitagraph Studios (1910-1915), making 150 very popular short comedies (dubbed “Bunny finches”) with actor John Bunny until he died in 1915. Finch founded her own production company in 1916, but never regained her popularity. She appeared in Orphans of the Storm (1921 – as a “starving peasant”) and The Cat and the Canary, in the supporting role of “Aunt Susan” in 1927. With the coming of sound her roles became even smaller, but she was in the 1934 production of The Scarlet Letter. She was an uncredited “window tapper” in her last film, 1939’s The Women. Flora Finch died of blood poisoning from an infected cut on her arm in 1940.

June 17, 1873 – The first day of the trial of Susan B. Anthony, accused of voting illegally in the presidential election on November 5, 1872, in Rochester, New York.

June 17, 1900 – Evelyn Graham Irons born, Scottish journalist for the Evening Standard; one of the first WWII newspaper women to reach Paris after it was liberated, and the first woman journalist to see Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest after its capture. She was the first woman war correspondent to receive the French Croix de Guerre. In 1935, she won the British Royal Humane Society’s Stanhope Medal for courageously rescuing a woman from drowning at Tresaith Beach, Cardiganshire. In 1952, she covered the U.S. presidential election, then stayed on in New York. In 1954, she broke the news embargo on the overthrow of Guatemalan President Jaobo Arbenz Guzmán, by hiring a mule to ride to Chiquimula, while other journalists, forbidden to cross the border, waited in a bar in Honduras, so she was the first reporter to reach the Provisional Government’s headquarters. An editor for a rival paper sent his reporter a telegram ordering him to “offget arse onget donkey.”

June 17, 1903 – Ruth Graves Wakefield born, inventor of the first chocolate chip cookie, at the Toll House Inn near Whitman MA in the 1930s.

June 17, 1908 – Trude Weiss-Rosmarin born in Germany; American editor and author; co-founder of the School of the Jewish Woman (1933); publisher and founder in 1939 of the Jewish Spectator, a quarterly magazine, which she edited for 50 years.

June 17-18, 1921 – Margaret Ray Ringenberg born, American pilot and a WASP during WWII; ferried aircraft from factories to airbases within the continental U.S. (1943-1944) until the WASP program was disbanded. She went home to Fort Wayne, Indiana, became a flight instructor, and married Morris Ringenberg. In the 1950s, she raced planes in the Powder Puff Derby, the Air Race Classic, the Grand Prix, and the Denver Mile High. In 1988, at age 68, she won the Air Race Classic. In 1994, she completed the Round-the-World Air Race at age 72, with two co-pilots. In 1998, her autobiography Girls Can’t Be Pilots was published. In 1999, she was received the NAA Elder Statesman in Aviation Award. In 2001, she flew in a race from London, England to Sydney, Australia at the age of 79. In 2008, she completed the 2,312-mile Air Race Classic race at the age of 87. About a month after completing the Air Race Classic, she passed away in her sleep, having logged over 40,000 hours in the air.

June 17-18, 1928 – Amelia Earhart made the first trans-Atlantic flight by a woman – as a passenger. The plane was piloted by Wilmer Stultz with Lou Gordon as mechanic. “The idea of just going as ‘extra weight’ did not appeal to me at all,” she said, but she accepted the offer, opening the way to sponsorship for her flights as a pilot.

June 17, 1943 – Chantal Mouffe born, Belgian political theorist, co-author of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a radical democratic politics with Ernesto Laclau, a post-Marxist redefining of Leftist politics, and her controversial book, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically.

June 17, 1948 – Jacqueline Jones born, American social historian; won the 1986 Bancroft Prize for her second book, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present, combining traditional historical sources with feminist scholarship; followed by The Dispossessed, America’s Underclasses from the Civil War to the Present, which continued her themes.

June 17, 1951 – Starhawk born Miriam Simos, American writer, activist, and theorist of feminist neopaganism and ecofeminism; her book The Spiral Dance helped inspire the Goddess movement.

June 17, 1952 – Estelle Morris born, Baroness Morris of Yardley; British Labour Party politician and former inner-city Humanities teacher; Member of Parliament for Birmingham Yardley (1992-2005); Minister of State for Schools (1998-2001); Secretary of State for Education and Skills (2001-2002); Minister of State for the Arts (2003-2005).

June 17, 1959 – Carol E. Anderson born, African American historian, professor of African American Studies at Emory University, and author of Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941–1960, and White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, winner of the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.

June 17, 1980 – Venus Williams born, American tennis player; former world No. 1 in both singles and doubles, winner of 7 Grand Slam singles titles; widely regarded as one of the all-time greats of tennis.

June 17, 2008 – Hundreds of same-sex couples married in California on the first full day gay marriage became legal. California voters voted to ban gay marriage in November, but the California Supreme Court overturned it.

DelMartinandPhyllisLyon-CaliforniasamesexweddinginJune1980.jpg — Phyllis Lyon (left in aqua) holding hands with Del Martin (right) — one of California’s same-sex weddings

June 17, 2015 – Loretta Lynch, first African American woman appointed as U.S. Attorney General, is sworn in by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, using a Bible once belonging to Frederick Douglass.

June 17, 2019 – Stella Creasy, Labour Member of Parliament for Walthanstow, spoke out after two miscarriages, during which she was forced to continue to work her full schedule without any additional support. Parliamentary standards authority recognised no form of maternity leave and didn’t automatically provide extra support for constituency work after an MP gives birth. Creasy said she felt parliament was telling her to “choose between being a mum and being an MP.” Pregnant for a third time, she was told MPs wouldn’t recieve any additional funding by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority for support staff needed for constituency work. “Heartbroken by all the years that I have struggled with fertility, I’ve kept these events to myself and made sure my constituents have never been affected,” she said. “Now I’m pregnant once more and terrified – not just that it will go wrong again, but because I know that my resolve to keep my private and professional lives separate has become impossible.” One rule change was made in 2019: the introduction of proxy voting, after Labour MP Tulip Siddiq, heavily pregnant, was forced to delay her caesarean section and cast her vote in a wheelchair. Siddiq said, “They were utterly baffled I was even having a baby, I was passed around and I was told ‘we have not got a historic policy on that because we have not had many women in parliament who give birth’… painting a picture that MPs could only be men or older women. I don’t think it was meant to be malicious. I think it was genuinely something that had not been dealt with, but it is the most normal thing in the world, having a baby.”

June 17, 2020 – Quaker Oats announced its Aunt Jemima brand of syrup and pancake mix was getting a new name and image. The Aunt Jemima products dated back 130 years. Jemima was originally dressed as a minstrel character, but in recent years Quaker dropped her “mammy” kerchief in response to growing criticism. “We recognize Aunt Jemima’s origins are based on a racial stereotype,” Kristin Kroepfl, VP and chief marketing officer of Quaker Foods North America, said in a news release. Daina Ramey Berry, a professor of history at the University of Texas, said the decision eliminates a racist depiction of black women reflecting a “plantation mentality.”

June 17, 2021 – In the UK, a long-awaited government review of the precipitous decline in rape prosecutions promised sweeping reform of how cases are handled in England and Wales, including targets for the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and police to increase the number of prosecutions, and shifting investigations from focusing on the victim’s credibility to arresting the perpetrator. Prosecutions fell nearly 60% between 2016-2017 and 2019- 2020, even though rape reports to police increased during that time. Ministers apologised to rape victims, saying they are “deeply ashamed” that thousands of survivors were failed on the government’s watch. Andrea Simon, director of the End Violence Against Women Coalition (EVAW), said that the review showed a desire to fix the justice system for rape survivors, but with “a distinct lack of urgency, [or] measures which reflect the ambition needed and resourcing of plans to make this a reality.” The police and the CPS were ordered to work together to increase the number of rape cases making it to trial, and return prosecutions to 2016 levels before the end of the 2021-2022 parliament. Operation Soteria, a pilot program to refocus police and CPS investigations on suspects rather than the complainants’ credibility, rolled out across four police forces before 2021 ended, with a national program to follow. Funding to cover the project for 12 months – £3.2m (just under $4 million USD) – came from the Home Office.

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June 18, 1318 – Eleanor of Woodstock born, daughter of King Edward II of England and Isabella of France. She was married at 14 to Reinoud II Duke of Guelders. Called “the black” for his dark coloring and his dark character, a widower in his 30s with four daughters, he had imprisoned his father for over six years. She gave birth to a son in 1333, but quickly bored her husband, so he and the priest Jan Moliart spread the lie that she had leprosy in order to send her into exile in 1336. When Reinoud tried to have the marriage annulled, Eleanor arrived at court to contest the annulment, stripping naked to prove she was no leper. He was forced to take her back, but fortunately for her, he died after a fall from his horse in 1343. Eleanor became regent for her 9-year-old son Reginald, and had Jan Moliart imprisoned. When Jan van Valkenburg, a relative of her late husband, contested her regency, she formally declared Reginald of legal majority at age 11, to prevent Moliart from gaining control over him. Eleanor retired from court as Lady of Vekuwe, becoming a benefactor of the Order of Saint Clare (‘Poor Clares’). During the 1350s, Reginald fell out with her over making peace with his younger brother Edward, and he confiscated her lands. She died impoverished at age 36 in a Cistercian convent.

June 18, 1865 – Fannie Pearson Hardy Eckstorm born, American ornithologist and folklorist.

June 18, 1873 – United States v. Susan B. Anthony: she was tried for voting in the 1872 presidential election. She believed the 14^th Amendment, intended to give male former slaves U.S. citizenship, including the right to vote, should also apply to women, because it said, “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” All ‘citizens’ and all ‘persons’ does not specify gender she contended, and should also apply to female citizens and persons. The Rochester Union and Advertiser editorialized: “Citizenship no more carries the right to vote that it carries the power to fly to the moon …” Anthony and other suffragists voted, after she threatened to sue the election inspectors if they refused to allow them to vote. A Rochester Democrat named Sylvester Lewis filed a complaint charging Anthony with registering and voting illegally. U.S. Commissioner William C. Storrs, acting on his complaint, issued a warrant for the arrest of Anthony, for violating section 19 of an act of Congress called the Enforcement Act, which carried a maximum penalty of $500 or three years imprisonment. Warrants were issued for the arrest of at least 14 other women for voting, but only Anthony was tried. Prior to her trial, she and her supporters wrote hundreds of letters, and she toured Monroe County NY, delivering her speech, “Is it a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote?” Causing such a stir the prosecutor got a change of venue to Ontario County, where Anthony began another speaking tour. The courtroom was filled to capacity. Her attorney called her to the witness stand, but the judge sustained the district attorney’s objection that “She is not a competent as a witness on her own behalf.” Immediately after the defense council’s two-hour closing argument, the judge took a paper out of his pocket, and read, “The Fourteenth Amendment gives no right to a woman to vote, and the voting by Miss Anthony was in violation of the law. Assuming that Miss Anthony believed she had a right to vote, that fact constitutes no defense if in truth she had not the right. She voluntarily gave a vote which was illegal, and thus is subject to the penalty of the law. Upon this evidence I suppose there is no question for the jury and that the jury should be directed to find a verdict of guilty.” So the jury was not allowed to decide the case. Her attorney argued for a new trial on the grounds that Anthony has been denied a trial by jury, but the judge denied the motion. Before sentencing, the judge asked, “Does the prisoner have anything to say why sentence shall not be pronounced?” Anthony responded, “Yes, your honor, I have many things to say; for in your ordered verdict of guilty, you have trampled underfoot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights, are all alike ignored. Robbed of the fundamental privilege of citizenship, I am degraded from the status of a citizen to that of a subject; and not only myself individually, but all of my sex, are, by your honor’s verdict, doomed to political subjection under this, so-called, form of government.” The judge interrupted, “The Court cannot listen to a rehearsal of arguments the prisoner’s counsel has already consumed three hours in presenting.” But Anthony persisted, even as the judge pounded his gavel, “May it please your honor, I am not arguing the question, but simply stating the reasons why sentence cannot, in justice, be pronounced against me. Your denial of my citizen’s right to vote, is the denial of my right of consent as one of the governed, the denial of my right of representation as one of the taxed, the denial of my right to a trial by a jury of my peers as an offender against law, therefore, the denial of my sacred rights to life, liberty, property an – “ The judge banged his gavel and repeatedly ordered her to sit down, but she continued until she said all she intended to say, then sat down, only to be told to rise for sentencing. She was fined $100 and the cost of the prosecution. Anthony refused to pay even “a dollar of the unjust penalty.” The judge, in a move to preclude any appeal to a higher court, responded, “Madam, the Court will not order you committed until the fine is paid.” American women fought another 47 years before the 19^th Amendment was ratified in 1920, recognizing women as citizens with the right to vote. Susan B. Anthony died at age 86, 14 years before the 19^th Amendment was ratified.

SusanB.Anthony-DogsBayingWithoutVoteQuote.jpg

June 18, 1900 – Vlasta Adele Vraz born in Chicago, Czech American fundraiser, relief worker, and editor. She was in Prague (1919-1939), but returned to the U.S. during WWII, working as a secretary for the Czech government-in-exile. In 1945, she went back to Czechoslovakia to direct American Relief for Czechoslovakia. Vraz was responsible for distribution of $4 million USD in food, medicine, clothing, and other assistance. For her relief work, she was inducted into the Czech Order of the White Lion in 1946. Yet in 1949, she was arrested by Czech authorities on espionage charges, but released after a week in custody when the U.S. applied diplomatic pressure. Back in the U.S., she became the Czechoslovak National Council of America president, and editor of publications for the Czechoslovak-American community. Vraz died at age 89, and was buried in Chicago’s Bohemian National Cemetery.

June 18, 1913 – Sylvia Porter born, American economist, author, and investment advice columnist for the New York Post.

June 18, 1913 – Françoise Loranger born, French Canadian playwright, scriptwriter, radio producer, and feminist; left school at age 15 (end of public education for girls in Québec in 1928); by 17, she was writing short stories for magazines. She wrote radio scripts (1938-1950), and published her first novel, Mathieu, in 1949. In the 1950s and 60s, she wrote scripts for television dramas, and a theatrical play, Une maison … un jour in 1965; her play, Encore cinq minutes, winner of 1967’s Governor General’s award for French Drama.

June 18, 1915 – Alice T. Schafer born, American mathematician; in 1932, she was the only female mathematics major at Virginia’s University of Richmond, where women were not allowed in the campus library. She won the department’s James D. Crump Prize in mathematics in her junior year, and completed her BA in mathematics in 1936. She worked as a secondary school teacher to save money for graduate school at the University of Chicago, where she pursued differential geometry of curves and implications of the singular point of a curve. Duke Mathematical Journal from Duke University Press published her initial work in 1944, and the American Journal of Mathematics published her next phase in 1948. After teaching elsewhere, she became a full professor at Wellesley College in 1962, and designed special classes for students having difficulties with math, expanded to help high school students. An Association for Women in Mathematics founding member in 1971, she was its second president (1973-1974). Retiring from Wellesley in 1980, she taught at Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia, until her second retirement in 1996; elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1985, and honored with an Award for Distinguished Service to Mathematics from the Mathematical Association of America in 1998.

June 18, 1924 – Liesbeth den Uyl born, Dutch activist, feminist, social- democratic politician, who wrote articles for the feminist publications Opzij and Margriet, and for the Amsterdam newspaper Het Parool. She was an active member of Roole Vrowen, the women’s organization that campaigned for labour. The “Liesbeth den Uyl-van Vessem Stichting” is named for her, a foundation advocating for women’s rights in countries under dictatorial governments.

June 18, 1937 – Gail Godwin born, American novelist and short story writer; three of her novels were finalists for the National Book Award: The Odd Woman, Violet Clay, and A Mother and Two Daughters.

June 18, 1941 – Delia Smith born, English cook, cookery columnist, author, and television presenter on her programmes Family Fare and How to Cook, until her retirement in 2013. Her popular 1971 book How to Cheat at Cooking, updated and reissued in 2008, again became a best-seller. Her influence on household cooking in Britain was dubbed the “Delia Effect,” since ingredients or cookware she used on a show would sell out the following day.

June 18, 1948 – Sherry Turkle born, American academic in human-technology interaction and author; professor of Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Her books, The Second Self, and Life on the Screen, discuss computers as part of our social and psychological lives and their affect on how we view ourselves.

June 18, 1952 – Isabella Rossellini born, Italian actress, filmmaker, activist, philanthropist, and author of Some of Me, Looking at Me, and In the name of the Father, the Daughter and the Holy Spirits: Remembering Roberto Rossellini. President and director of the Howard Gilman Foundation, advocating for wildlife preservation, arts, and photography. She was on the board of the Wildlife Conservation Network, and is a National Ambassador for the U.S. Fund for UNICEF.

June 18, 1960 – Barbara Broccoli born, American film producer, noted for producing the James Bond franchise, and staging musical theatre versions of successful films.

June 18, 1961 – Angela Johnson born, African American poet, children’s and young adult author. She won three Coretta Scott King Awards, for: Toning the Sweep (1994), Heaven (1999), and The First Part Last (2004).

June 18, 1962 – Lisa Randall born, American theoretical physicist working in particle physics and cosmology; professor on the Harvard physics faculty; contributor to the Randall-Sundrum model, a five-dimensional warped geometry theory, which she co-published in 1999 with Raman Sundrum; honored with the 2007 Lilienfeld Prize and the 2012 Andrew Germant Award. Her controversial Dark Matter Disk Model posits that 66 million years ago, a tiny twitch caused by an invisible force in the far reaches of the cosmos hurled a comet three times the width of Manhattan toward Earth. The collision produced the most powerful earthquake of all time and released energy a billion times that of an atomic bomb, superheating the atmosphere, killing three-quarters of life on Earth. Author of Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions; and Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World.

June 18, 1972 – Anu Tali born, Estonian conductor; Music Director of the Sarasota Orchestra in Florida (2013-2019), and co-founder of the Nordic Symphony Orchestra; Estonia honored her with the Cultural Award of Estonia in 2003, and she received the Presidential Award of Estonia in 2004.

June 18, 1980 – Shakuntala Devi, Indian writer and mental calculator, won a place in the Guinness Book of Records, by mentally multiplying two randomly generated numbers of 13 digits each from the computer department of the Imperial College London, and producing the correct answer in just 28 seconds: 7,686,369,774,870 x 2,465,099,745,779 = 18,947,668,177,995,426,462,773,730

June 18, 1983 – NASA Astronaut Sally K. Ride became America’s first woman in space when she and four colleagues blasted off aboard the space shuttle Challenger.

June 18, 1983 – Mona Mahmudnizhad, 17-years-old and youngest of ten Bahá’í women hanged in Shiraz, Iran, because of their Bahá’í Faith. The official charges against Mahmudnizhad ranged from “misleading children and youth” because she taught children expelled from school for their beliefs, to being a “Zionist” because the Bahá’í World Centre is located in Israel.

June 18, 2006 – Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori elected as the first woman presiding bishop for the Episcopal Church, U.S. arm of the global Anglican Communion.

June 18, 2013 – Russia passes a law banning same-sex couples, singles, and unmarried couples from countries where same-sex marriage is legal from adopting Russian children. Single Russians may adopt, but adopting couples must be married. In 2012, Russia banned all adoptions by Americans; an estimated 600,000 Russian orphans remained in their care system in 2013.

June 18, 2019 – Brazilian soccer superstar Marta scored her 17th World Cup goal, the top-scorer in tournament history for both men and women. Celebrating her record-breaking goal, Marta pointed to her cleat, where an equal sign in pink and blue signified her commitment to gender equality in sport and beyond.

June 18, 2019 – Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, one of Europe’s leading engineering universities, announced, its job vacancies would be exclusively open to women candidates for at least the next 18 months in order to overcome the institution’s “implicit gender bias.” Frank Baaijens, the university’s rector, said progress toward a better balance of women and men in academic roles has been stubbornly slow, “We attach great importance to equal respect and opportunities for women and men. And it has long been known that a diverse workforce performs better. It leads to better strategies, more creative ideas and faster innovation.” Under the new recruitment policy, men will only be eligible for any academic post if no qualified woman candidate is found within six months of a job becoming available. This is a five-year programme, during which about 150 positions are expected to become vacant. Depending on its success in recruiting women during the first 18 months, the proportion of vacancies only open to women may be adjusted. An additional 100,000 Euros will be allocated to each new woman hired, for mentoring her and funding her own research projects.

June 18, 2020 – Mary Elizabeth Taylor, Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs (2018-2020), submitted her resignation to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Taylor, 30, the youngest person, and first black woman to hold the position, was the only African-American State Department senior official under the Trump Administration. “Moments of upheaval can change you, shift the trajectory of your life, and mold your character,” she wrote in her resignation letter, obtained by The Washington Post. “The president’s comments and actions surrounding racial injustice and black Americans cut sharply against my core values and convictions.” Prior to joining the State Department, she was an aide to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Republican-Kentucky) and worked in the Trump White House as deputy director for nominations.

June 18, 2021 – In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s rightwing government passed legislation banning portrayals of gay people or LGBT+ content from school educational materials, children’s television programs, or ads aimed at children. Laws had previously been passed to end legal recognition of trans people, preventing people from altering their gender or name on official documents, and banning non-heterosexual couples from adopting children. The Budapest Pride organization planned a huge Pride parade and celebration in defiance of Orbán’s legislation. Viktória Radványi of Budapest Pride said, “We are planning to show all the people who are afraid and anxious and think they cannot be happy because this government is crushing human rights and freedom of speech and freedom of the media that there is hope, and that there are a lot of people who are more and more organised.” She pointed to a recent Ipsos poll showing over 60% of Hungarian people believe that same sex parents were “just as likely as other parents” to raise a child well. “A majority – we never expected that result after two years of hate campaigning,” she said. “Our personal experience was the same and now this poll … has confirmed it: that Hungarian people are not as hateful and much less homophobic than the government.” The European Commission launched legal action against Orbán’s government for contravening European values of tolerance and individual freedom. In July, 2021, thousands of Hungarians marched in the Budapest Pride’s largest parade yet.

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June 19, 1833 – Mary Tenney Gray born, American suffragist, editorial writer, club-woman, and philanthropist; editorial staffer for the New York Teacher, the Leavenworth Home Record (dedicated to women’s welfare and elevation), and the Kansas Farmer. She also contributed to Kansas magazines and newspapers. In 1859, she lobbied unsuccessfully for voting rights for women to be included in the state constitution. Gray was a leader in women’s clubs formed for art, education, literary, and philanthropic purposes, and a co-founder and first president of the Social Science Club of Kansas and Western Missouri, a statewide association of most local clubs and the first of its kind in the area, holding conventions where women could hear speakers and combine the efforts of their organizations. Gray read papers like “Women and Kansas City’s Development” at the conventions, and other state gatherings. After her death in 1904, the Kansas Federation of Women’s Clubs dedicated a monument to her memory in Kansas City.

June 19, 1843 – Mary Sibbet Copley Thaw born, American philanthropist and charity worker who funded archaeology research, including supporting women archaeologists like Alice Fletcher and Zelia Nuttall, and founder of the Thaw Fellowship at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard.

June 19, 1856 – Elisabeth Marbury born, pioneering American theatrical and literary agent whose clients included Oscar Wilde, James M. Barrie, George Bernard Shaw, Edmond Rostand, dancers Vernon and Irene Castle, and children’s author Frances Hodgson Burnett.

June 19, 1865 – Dame May Whitty born as Mary Louise Webster, distinguished English stage and film actress. In 1918, she and opera singer Nellie Melba were the first two women entertainers to made Dame Commanders of the British Empire. Witty was honoured for her volunteer work during WWI for the Three Arts Women’s Employment Fund and the British Women’s Hospital Committee. She was also chair of the Actresses’ Franchise League, a British suffrage organization for women who were or had been in the theatrical profession. At age 72, she made her Hollywood film debut in Night Must Fall, with Robert Montgomery and Rosalind Russell, for which she was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. She played Miss Froy, the title character in Alfred Hitchcock’s film, The Lady Vanishes, and Lady Beldon in Mrs. Miniver, which earned her another Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. May Whitty died at age 82 in 1948. Her final film, The Return of October, was released four months after her death.

May Whitty — Actresses’ Franchise League suffrage pin

June 19, 1881 – Maginel Wright Enright born, American illustrator and children’s author. She illustrated L. Frank Baum’s early books, well before his Oz series, did covers for Ladies’ Home Journal and McClure’s, and designed high-fashion shoes for Capezio.

MaginelWrightEnright-WomansWorld-Midsummer1921cover.jpg

June 19, 1883 – Gladys Mills Phipps born, American thoroughbred racehorse owner-breeder, founder of the Phipps family horseracing dynasty, dubbed “First Lady of the Turf.”

June 19, 1885 – Adela Pankhurst born, British suffragette, active in the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), founded by her mother Emmeline; Adela moved to Australia in 1913. Breaking with her mother’s policy of supporting the WWI British war effort, she made anti-war and anti-conscription speeches.

June 19, 1888 – Hilda Worthington Smith born, labor educator and social worker, first Director of Bryn Mawr’s Summer School for Women Workers in Industry (founded in 1921), an 8-week liberal arts course for factory workers, many of them immigrants. Only a handful of students had more than a few years of elementary school education, but several participants went on to become labor leaders.

Bryn Mawr summer labor school — Hilda Worthington Smith

June 19, 1900 – Laura Hobson born, American novelist and short story writer; author of Gentleman’s Agreement.

June 19, 1903 – Mary Callery born, American Modern and Abstract Expressionist artist and sculptor; in 1930s Paris, she bought work by Picasso, Duchamps, Calder, and Matisse. She was commissioned in the 1960s to create a sculpture for the top of the proscenium arch at the Metropolitan Opera House in Manhattan.

June 19, 1919 – Pauline Kael born, influential American film critic for The New Yorker magazine (1968-1991). Known for controversial essays on Orson Welles and Citizen Kane disputing the co-author screenplay credit for Welles.

June 19, 1922 – Marilyn P. Johnson born, U.S. career diplomat; served in the U.S. Navy during WWII, then taught English as a foreign language in schools in Cameroon and Mali; joined the U.S. Foreign Service in 1964, and worked in Mali, Tunisia, and Niger in cultural affairs and public affairs; Deputy Assistant Director of the Information Centers Program (1971-1974); after two years learning Russian, she became cultural affairs officer in Moscow (1976-1978); U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Togo (1978-1981).

WestAfricamap-MarilynP.Johnson-PortraitbySarahShaw.jpg — Marilyn P. Johnson, portrait by Sarah Shaw — West Africa map (Togo is left of Benin)

June 19, 1926 – Erna Schneider Hoover born, American mathematician and inventor of a computerized telephone switching method which revolutionized modern communication, by monitoring call traffic centers and prioritizing tasks, preventing system overloads during peak calling times. Working at Bell Laboratories over 32 years, Hoover was a trailblazer for women in the computer technology field. Graduated with honors from Wellesley College (1948) then earning a Ph.D. from Yale University in philosophy and foundations of mathematics (1951), Hoover became a professor at Swarthmore College (1951-1954), but never gained tenure, probably because she married in 1953. Her husband, Charles Wilson Hoover Jr., was very supportive of her career aspirations. In 1954, she became a senior technical associate at Bell Labs, and was promoted in 1956. At this time, switching systems were moving from electronic to computer-based technologies. Hoover was able to use her knowledge of symbolic logic and feedback theory to develop the Stored Program Control System, which programmed call center mechanisms to impose incoming calls to impose order, giving priority to input and output processes of phone calls over less urgent processes like record keeping and billing. The idea came to her in the hospital after she gave birth to her second daughter. The Bell Labs Lawyers handling the patent had to go to her house so she could sign the papers while she was on maternity leave.

June 19, 1940 – Shirley Muldowney born, race car driver, first woman to get a National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) license to drive Top Fuel dragsters; won the NHRA Top Fuel championship in 1977, 1980, and 1982, becoming the first person to win three Top Fuel titles.

June 19, 1942 – Merata Mita born, New Zealand filmmaker; first Māori woman to solely write and direct a dramatic feature film, Mauri, in 1988, after making the landmark documentary films Bastion Point: Day 507 in 1980, and Patu! in 1983.

June 19, 1945 – Aung San Sun Kyi born, Burmese politician, activist, and author, Chair of the National League for Democracy, recipient of the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, and the Nobel Peace Prize. The first State Counsellor of Myanmar (2016-2021), she was deposed and arrested by the military during the 2021 Myanmar coup d’état after they declared the November 2020 Myanmar general election results fraudulent. Charged in a series of trials with multiple counts of corruption, which the deputy director for Asia of Human Rights Watch called a “courtroom circus of secret proceedings on bogus charges,” and sentenced to 13 years in prison.

June 19, 1954 – Kathleen Turner born, American film and stage actress, director, feminist, and activist for social justice and human rights; winner of two Golden Globes, nominated for an Academy Award and twice for Tony Awards. Her busy acting career was drastically curtailed in the 1990s by rheumatoid arthritis, so severe she could barely walk. The medication to treat the disease altered her appearance, but it worsened for eight years before new treatments put her arthritis into remission. Turner is an active supporter of Planned Parenthood, on the board of People for the American Way, and volunteers for Amnesty International and Citymeals-on-Wheels. She also raises awareness of rheumatoid arthritis.

June 19, 1955 – Mary Schapiro born, first woman permanent appointment as Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC, 2009-2012); Chair and CEO of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA, 2006-2009); National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD, 1996-2005.

June 19, 1957 – Anna Lindh born, Swedish Social Democratic politician, Minister of Foreign Affairs (1998-2003); Chair of the Council of the European Union (2001); Minister for the Environment (1994-1996); Member of the Riksdag. Lindh was assassinated in September 2003, stabbed to death by a man born in Sweden to Serbian parents, found to be mentally ill.

June 19, 1972 – Robin Tunney born, American actress, played Teresa Lisbon on the television series The Mentalist (2008-2015). In 2006, she won $200,000 for her chosen charity, The Children’s Health Fund, on Celebrity Poker Showdown, coming in second at the final table.

June 19, 2015 – International Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict proclaimed by the UN General Assembly, to commemorate adoption in 2008 of Resolution 1820, “to eliminate all forms of violence against women and girls, including by ending impunity and by ensuring the protection of civilians, in particular women and girls, during and after armed conflicts, in accordance with the obligations States have undertaken under international humanitarian law and international human rights law.”

InternationalDayfortheEliminationofSexualViolenceinConflict.jpg

June 19, 2019 – Joy Harjo, Muscogee Creek Nation poet, author, and musician, became the first Native American named as the U.S. Poet Laureate, and served a rare third term after the usual two terms (2019- 2022).

June 19, 2019 – A scandal erupted in 2018 over several medical schools in Japan manipulating exam results to give first-time male applicants an advantage over women. Juntendo University in Tokyo announced they would “abolish the unfair treatment of female applicants.” In 2019, of the 1,679 woman applicants who took Juntendo’s entrance examinations, 8.28% passed. Of the 2,202 male candidates, 7.72% passed the exam, the first time in seven years that the pass rate among women was higher than among men. The pass rate among women was also higher at other medical schools. The Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper broke the story that exams were rigged for over a decade to help male candidates, because of “concerns” that women who became doctors would take long maternity leaves or leave the profession entirely to have children. Japan Joint Association of Medical Professional Women member Dr Rurioko Tshushima said: “If doctors are having to work long hours to cover maternity leave, that is not a problem with the capability of female doctors, it is a problem with the system.” In 2016, just 21.1% of all doctors in Japan were women, the lowest level among nations belonging to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Japan has a shortage of doctors – only 2.4 doctors for every 1,000 residents – compared to 3.4 doctors for other OECD member countries.

June 19, 2019 – Louisville Mayor Greg Fisher announced one of the three officers involved in the killing of Breonna Taylor was fired. Taylor was a Black 26-year-old emergency room technician. The police broke into her home on March 13 using a no-knock warrant related to drug dealers who lived far from Taylor’s apartment. The police “blindly” shot Taylor at least eight times. Interim Louisville police Chief Robert Schroeder confirmed the department fired Officer Brett Hankison. “I find your conduct a shock to the conscience,” Schroeder wrote in a letter to Hankison. The other two officers involved in the shooting were on administrative reassignment. Federal charges were filed against several members of the Louisville Police Department, but one officer was later hired by the Carroll County Sheriff’s Office.

June 19, 2020 – In an interview with Harper’s Bazaar, actress Keira Knightly, asked if she had ever experienced sexual harassment, responded, “Yes! I mean, everybody has. Literally, I don’t know anyone who hasn’t been in some way, whether it’s being flashed at, or groped, or some guy saying they’re going to slit your throat, or punching you in the face, or whatever it is, everybody has … It was when women started listing all the precautions they take when they walk home to make sure they’re safe, and I thought, ‘I do every single one of them, and I don’t even think about it.’” She called the situation “fucking depressing.”

June 19, 2021 – Over 1000 women traveled from 70 of Turkey’s 81 provinces to demonstrate in Istanbul against their government’s withdrawal from the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence, ironically dubbed the Istanbul Convention, because it was adopted at the 121^st Session of the Committee of Ministers, held in Istanbul in 2011. At that time, Turkey was the first country to ratify the convention, ratified by 67 other countries between 2012 and 2019, and now in effect. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s withdrawing his country from the treaty in March 2021 sent shockwaves throughout Turkey, with women’s rights activists calling the move an attempt to relegate women to “second class citizens.” Religious and conservative groups oppose the convention, claiming it encourages divorce and undermines traditional family values. They are especially vocal about the clause requiring government to protect victims from discrimination regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity, saying this clause may lead to gay marriage. Gokce Gokcen, an opposition party member of parliament and supporter of women’s rights, tweeted, “You are failing to protect the right to life.”

June2021TurkishwomenprotestwithdrawalfromIstanbulConvention.jpg — Turkish women protesting Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention

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June 20, 1786 – Marceline Desbordes-Valmore born, French poet and novelist; orphaned by 16, she became an actress and singer at the Paris Opéra-Comique and other theatres, but retired from the stage in 1823. In 1819, she was a founder of French romantic poetry when she published her first poetic work, Élégies et Romances, followed in 1821 by her narrative Veillées des Antilles, and five more volumes of poetry between 1825 and 1860 (the last one published posthumously). She was the only woman included in the notable Les Poètes maudits anthology published by Paul Verlaine in 1884.

June 20, 1847 – “Gina” Krog born as Jørgine Sverdrup Krog, Norwegian suffragist, writer, editor, teacher, and politician. A leading campaigner for women’s right to vote. Co-founder in 1884 of the Norwegian Association for Women’s Rights with newspaper editor and Liberal MP Hagbard Berner, and a member of the Norwegian National Women’s Council. She spearheaded presentation of women’s suffrage proposals to the Storting (the parliament of Norway). Krog wrote articles, made speeches, attended international women’s rights conferences in Europe and North America, and was editor (1887-1916) of Nylænde (New Land), a Norwegian feminist periodical. Krog joined the fledgling Liberal Party, and was a deputy member of its national board. After much petitioning, the Norwegian government in 1910 granted Norwegian women who owned property – or whose husbands owned property – vote rights in municipal elections. In 1913, the Storting voted unanimously to extend universal women’s suffrage to general elections. Krog died in 1916 during an influenza epidemic at age 68. She was the first Norwegian woman honoured with a funeral at public expense. The Prime Minister, the President of the Storting, and the Supreme Court Chief Justice attended her funeral.

June 20, 1868 – Helen Miller Gould Shepard born, American heiress and philanthropist; during the Spanish-American War, she gave $50,000 toward military hospital supplies, and was active in the Women’s National War Relief Association, nursing wounded soldiers. She donated the library building at New York University and gave $10,000 for the NYU engineering school. She also gave contributions to Rutgers College, and the YWCA, serving on the YWCA’s national board.

June 20, 1884 – Mary R. Calvert born, American astronomical computer and astrophotographer; worked at the Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin for her uncle, astronomer Edward E. Barnard, as an assistant and human computer in 1905; when Barnard died in 1923, she became curator of the Yerkes photographic plate collection and a high-level assistant until her retirement in 1946; co-author, with Frank Elmore Ross, of Atlas of the Northern Milky Way, published in 1934.

June 20, 1895 – Carolyn Willard Baldwin received the first ever Ph.D. in Science awarded to a woman by an American university, from Cornell University, graduating third in her class; Baldwin was also the first woman to earn a Bachelor of Science degree from the School of Mechanics at the University of California. She taught physics at a vocational secondary school, barred from teaching at university level because she was married.

June 20, 1897 – Elisabeth Hauptmann born, German author and playwright; best known for collaborating with Berthold Brecht on the The Threepenny Opera. When the Nazis took over, she went into exile in the U.S. (1934-1949). After the war, she worked as a dramaturg for the Berlin Ensemble.

June 20, 1905 – Lillian Hellman born, American playwright and screenwriter; Toys in the Attic, The Children’s Hour, and The Little Foxes; blacklisted by Hollywood after she refused to answer questions at the House Un-American Activities hearings.

June 20, 1911 – Gail Patrick born, American actress and executive producer, noted for producing the Perry Mason television series.

June 20, 1914 – Muazzez İlmiye Çığ born, Turkish archaeologist, Assyriologist, and author, specialist in Sumerian civilization, known for her painstaking research and success in deciphering cuneiform tablets; advocate for secularism and women’s rights in Turkey; her 2005 book, Bereket Kültü ve Mabet Fahişeliği (Cult of Fertility and Holy Prostitution), caused a storm of controversy because her research into the khimar, the headscarf worn by Islamic women, revealed it did not originate in the Muslim world, but was worn 5,000 years ago by Sumerian priestesses who initiated young men into sex. She and her publisher were charged with “inciting hatred based on religious differences.” She testified at the first hearing in 2006: “I am a woman of science … I never insulted anyone.” The charges were dismissed after she and her publisher were acquitted in less than half an hour.

June 20, 1917 – Helena Rasiowa born, Polish mathematician, her work on algebraic logic continues to be highly influential; during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, her family’s home and all its contents, including all her notes and the only copy of her Master’s thesis were burned; she rewrote the thesis, and got her Masters in 1945, then her Doctorate in 1950.

June 20, 1927 – Simin Behbahani born as Simin Khalili, Iranian icon of contemporary Persian poetry, lyricist, and activist, dubbed “the Lioness of Iran.” She was a major force in bringing the ghazal, a traditional Persian verse form, into modern usage; President of the Iranian Writers Association, Behbahani faced a constant threat of censorship and arrest after the Iranian Revolution in 1979, but was honored with international awards for her poetry and her humanitarian and civil rights advocacy, including the Simone de Beauvoir Prize for Women’s Freedom in 2009, and the Janus Pannonius Poetry Prize (2013).

June 20, 1929 – Edith Windsor born, American LGBT rights activist and IBM technology manager, honored by the National Computing Conference in 1987 as a pioneer in operating systems. She and her partner were legally married in Toronto Canada in 2007, after being registered domestic partners in New York since 1993; when her wife died in 2009, Windsor was executor and sole beneficiary. As a spouse, she should have qualified for a spousal deduction, and paid no federal estate taxes. Windsor was forced to pay $363,053.00 to the IRS because the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) specified in Section 3 that the term “spouse” only applied to marriages between a man and a woman. She filed a lawsuit against the federal government, United States v. Windsor; the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to overturn Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act as violating due process guarantees of the Fifth Amendment, considered a landmark legal victory for the same-sex marriage movement.

June 20, 1933 – Claire Tomalin born, English author and biographer of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Pepys, Jane Austen, Katherine Mansfield, the actress Mrs. Jordan, and Mary Wollstonecraft; Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self and The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft each won the Whitbread Book Award.

June 20, 1945 – Anne Murray born, Canadian singer; first Canadian woman soloist to reach #1 on the U.S. charts, and first to earn a Gold record, for her song “Snowbird” (1970). She was Honorary National Chair of the Canadian Save The Children Fund, and an active supporter of Colon Cancer Canada, and environmentalist David Suzuki’s Nature Challenge.

June 20, 1951 – Sheila McLean born, distinguished Scottish legal scholar and author; first appointee as an International Bar Association Professor of Law and Ethics in Medicine, and director of the Institute of Law and Medical Ethics at the University of Glasgow; UK Adviser to the European branch of the World Health Organization on revision of its ‘Health for All’ policy; member of the UNESCO Biomedical Ethics Committee.

June 20, 1967 – Nicole Kidman born in Australia, Australian-American actress and producer; won the 2003 Best Actress Oscar for The Hours. She was a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF and the UN Development Fund for Women.

June 20, 1983 – Patrisse Cullors born, American civil rights activist, co-founder of #BlackLivesMatter; also an advocate for defunding the police and LGBTQ+ rights. Author of When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir.

June 20, 1988 – New York State Club Association Inc. v. City of New York: The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld a New York law making it illegal for private clubs with more than 400 members to discriminate against women and minorities. Lynn Hecht Schafran, a lawyer for the National Organization for Women, called it the “latest in a line of cases recognizing the harm done to a large number of women and minorities when they are excluded from organizations and clubs which are central to the business, civic, professional, and public life of the country.”

June 20, 2016 – Virginia Raggi elected as Rome’s first woman Mayor – and youngest at age 37 – (2016-2021); member of Rome’s City Council (2013-2016).

June 20, 2019 – Britain’s Conservative Party was plunged into scandal when MP Mark Field, Foreign Office Minister, was caught on camera grabbing and manhandling a woman, one of the Greenpeace climate crisis protesters disrupting Chancellor Philip Hammond’s speech at Mansion House. Field shoved the woman against a pillar, gripped her by the back of her neck, and marched her away. Greenpeace UK said: “We were shocked at the footage of an elected MP and government minister assaulting one of our peaceful protesters at the Mansion House tonight.” City of London Police reviewed the incident but took no further action becacause he was an MP. Field was suspended and later dropped as minister. Ironically, Field delivered a speech in May at a Westminster Hall debate in which he decried violence against and intimidation of female activists across the world.

June 20, 2020 – Melina Abdullah of BLM Los Angeles and Patrisse Cullors, BLM Global Network Foundation chair for years, relentlessly protested against the Los Angeles Police Department’s racial bias, advocating for criminal justice reform, speaking out at Police Commission meetings, and picketing City Hall. With 500 members, the L.A. chapter became one of the biggest and most influential in the BLM network. The chapter helped families who lost a loved one to police violence by ordering and paying for independent autopsies, costing upwards of $6,000. Abdullah said those autopsies can make all the difference in wrongful-death lawsuits. BLM also requests body-cam video from police departments, removes law enforcement officials’ narration, and puts the raw footage back out on social media. “We try to strip it of their narrative, so that people can see what actually happened,” Abdullah said. During the nation-wide protests over the police killing of George Floyd, Black Lives Matter became a mainstream movement, with an estimated 100,000 participants at the BLM protest on June 7 in Hollywood alone, and protests in over 2,000 cities and towns in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Cullors said, “This is a movement led and envisioned and directed by Black women,” she said. “Many of us are queer, we’re moms, and we really started this work because we wanted to see our children survive. We’re laying the groundwork and foundation for a new world, not just for our descendants but for right now.” She describes BLM, declaring, “We didn’t build it as a policy think tank; we built it as a cultural movement. That’s why everybody feels moved by it. It’s why it tugs at people’s hearts. It’s why it pisses people off. It’s why people felt like they had to pick a side.”

June 20, 2021 – UN Women asked artists from all over the world to visualize what gender equality means to them, and received over 1,000 submissions.

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June 21, 1734 – Marie-Joseph Angélique, a slave in New France, is put to death, convicted of setting the fire that destroyed much of Old Montreal. Scholars do not agree about her guilt or innocence, but her testimony gives insight into slavery in Canada then.

June 21, 1870 – Clara Immerwahr born, German chemist of Jewish descent; first woman awarded a doctorate in chemistry in Germany (magna cum laude); a women’s rights advocate who was frustrated with the limitations marriage to chemist Fritz Haber placed on her; unable to work outside the home, she contributed to her husband’s work without recognition, and translated some of his papers into English; during WWI, she disapproved of Haber’s work on chemical weapons, including the first mass use of poison gas, at the second Battle of Ypres in Belgium. She spoke out against the research as a “perversion of the ideals of science.” In 1915, shortly after he returned from Belgium, she committed suicide, using his military pistol to shoot herself in the chest, and died in her 13-year-old son Hermann’s arms. Haber left the next day to stage the first gas attack against the Russians on the Eastern Front.

June 21, 1883 – Daisy Turner born, American storyteller, noted for oral recording of her family history traced back to Africa and England; at age 103, she was featured in Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary reciting a poem.

June 21, 1912 – Mary McCarthy, American novelist, critic, and liberal activist; her most successful novel, The Group, remained on the Best Seller List for two years. In 1967 and 1969, she traveled to North and South Vietnam, reporting on the Vietnam War from an anti-war perspective, and published two books, Vietnam, and Hanoi.

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June 21, 1918 – Josephine Webb born, pioneering American woman electrical engineer, held two patents for oil circuit breaker contact design, nicknamed “switchgear.” In 1942, she worked for Westinghouse as a Design Engineer on the electrical grids for the Coulee, Hoover, and Boulder Dams. In 1946, while working as Director of Development for Alden Products, she designed an 18 inch, full newspaper size fax machine with superior resolution. Co-founded Webb Consulting Company with her husband Herbert, another electrical engineer, specializing in electrical-electronic measurement instrumentation, communications applications, and photographic test devices.

June 21, 1921 – Judy Holliday born, American comedian, stage and film actress, and singer; she originated the Billie Dawn role in Born Yesterday on stage, and won an Oscar for Best Actress for playing the character in the film version. She used the character to her advantage when she was suspected of being “pro-Communist” in 1952, and subpoenaed by Senator Pat McCarran’s Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. Her legal counsel, Simon Rifkind, advised her to “play dumb,” so she played ‘Billie Dawn’ for the committee, avoided naming any names, and was cleared by the anti-Communist investigation. Her career was unaffected, unlike many others in the entertainment industry whose careers were damaged just by being investigated.

June 21, 1931 – Margaret Heckler born, American Republican politician, member of the U.S. House of Representatives (1967-1983); Secretary of Health and Human Services (1983-1985); and Ambassador to Ireland (1986-1989). Heckler was an advocate for women’s issues, including the Equal Rights Amendment and Title IX, which prohibited sex discrimination in education, and was a co-founder and co-chairwoman of the bipartisan Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues.

June 21, 1935 – Françoise Sagan born, French novelist, playwright, and screenwriter; Bonjour Tristesse (Hello Sadness); Un certain sourire (A Certain Smile); Château en Suède (Château in Sweden); and La Chamade (That Mad Ache).

June 21, 1940 – Mariette Hartley born, American actress and founder of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Notable for her performances in Ride the High Country and The Last Hurrah, and her many guest appearances on television series. Hartley is a three-time Emmy winner for Outstanding Lead Actress. She also appeared onstage in her one-woman show, If You Get to Bethlehem, You’ve Gone Too Far, and as Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter. But most television viewers recognize her from the popular TV commercials she made with James Garner for Polaroid cameras, where the rapport between the two convinced some viewers they were married in real life. Hartley had a t-shirt printed with “I am not Mrs. James Garner,” to which Garner’s wife Lois responded with a t-shirt of her own, “I am Mrs. James Garner.” When their contracts for the commercials came up for renewal, James Garner discovered he was paid considerably more than Mariette Hartley, and struck a blow for equal pay by refusing to sign his contract until her contract was for the same amount as his. Hartley is a long-time suicide prevention activist, and promotes awareness of bipolar disorder, because of her father’s suicide.

June 21, 1942 – Marjorie Margolies born, American journalist, Democratic politician, academic, and women’s rights activist; U.S. Representative from Pennsylvania (1993-1995); Director/Deputy Chair of the U.S. delegation to the UN’s 4^th World Conference on Women (1995); Founder and Chair of Women’s Campaign International (WCI), which provides advocacy training for women throughout the world; adjunct professor at Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania; author of The Girls in the Newsroom, and co-author of They Came to Stay.

June 21, 1947 – Shirin Ebadi born, Iranian lawyer, judge, author, human and women’s rights activist. The first woman judge in Iran (1969-1979), she was forced to leave the bench after the Islamic Revolution. In 2000, Ebadi was jailed for three weeks and suspended from practicing law for five years after being accused of releasing a supposedly slanderous video about members of the government. She was the recipient of the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize for her work for democracy and human rights, especially women’s, children’s, and refugee rights, the first Iranian and first Muslim woman to be honored with the peace prize. In 2006, she published her memoir, Iran Awakening: One Woman’s Journey to Reclaim Her Life and Country, followed by Refugee Rights in Iran in 2008, when she began receiving death threats. After her office was raided and closed down without explanation by Iranian security forces in December 2008, Ebadi went into exile in the UK as Iran’s government continued to increase persecution of any citizens critical of its policies. By the end of 2009, Iran had her bank accounts frozen. In 2011, her book, The Golden Cage: Three Brothers, Three Choices, One Destiny, was published, and in 2016, Until We Are Free: My Fight for Human Rights in Iran.

June 21, 1950 – Anne Carson born, Canadian poet, essayist, translator, and Classics professor; she won the 1996 Lannan Literary Award, a 1997 Pushcart Prize, and the 2001 T.S. Eliot Prize for The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos.

June 21, 1951 – Lenore Manderson born, Australian medical anthropologist; early research in Tropical Health led to her becoming a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences; her later research concerns social history, public health, and anthropology, studying the effects of inequality, social exclusion, and marginality on health and public health policy; professor at Monash University since 2005.

June 21, 1953 – Benazir Bhutto born, Pakistani stateswoman and politician; Prime Minister of Pakistan in two non-consecutive terms (1993-1996 and 1988-1990). After her father, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was ousted and executed in a military coup, she and her mother Nusrat led the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy. Bhutto was leader of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP – 1982-2007), and repeatedly imprisoned by the military government, then exiled to Britain in 1984. She returned to Pakistan in 1986, and was elected as Prime Minister, but was dismissed in 1990, amidst charges and counter-charges. The rigged election ensured victory for the conservative Islamic Democratic Alliance. Bhutto served as Leader of the Opposition (1997-1999) until the new regime was dismissed on corruption charges. She went into self-exile in 1998, then returned to Pakistan in October 2007 (she survived a bombing attack on her motorcade, but 180 people were killed and 500 injured) to compete in the January 2008 election. Bhutto was killed in another attack, by gunfire and a suicide bomber, after a political rally in December 2007. The bombing killed another 24 other people in the crowd.

June 21, 1957 – Ellen Fairclough sworn in as Canada’s first woman Cabinet Minister, Secretary of State (1957-1958); in February 1958, she briefly served as Acting Prime Minister, the first woman to have the responsibility. As Minister of Citizenship and Immigration (1958-1962), she introduced new regulations that greatly reduced racial discrimination in immigration policy, and increased the number of immigrants allowed into Canada, then served as Postmaster General (1962-1963). She was a Member of Parliament (1950-1963), advocating for women’s rights, including equal pay for equal work, but was defeated in her 1963 bid for re-election. Fairclough was active in the Consumers Association of Canada and the YWCA. In 1979, named an Officer of the Order of Canada, then promoted to Companion in 1994. Her book, Saturday’s Child: Memoirs of Canada’s First Female Cabinet Minister, was published in 1995.

June 21, 1960 – Kate Brown born in Spain, where her father was serving in the U.S. Air Force; Democratic politician; incumbent Governor of Oregon since 2015; Oregon Secretary of State (2009-2015); Oregon 21^st district state Senator (1997-2009); Oregon state House of Representatives member for the 13^th district (1991-1997). Brown has a BA in Environmental Conservation, a certificate in Women’s Studies from the University of Colorado at Boulder (1981), and a J.D. degree and certificate in Environmental Law from the Northwestern School of Law at Lewis and Clark College (1985). Noted for her rigorous performance audits to help balance the state’s budget, and signing of a “motor voter” bill to automatically register voters using driver’s license data. During her tenure as Secretary of State, Oregon became the first U.S. jurisdiction to use iPad and tablet technology to help voters with disabilities mark their ballots.

June 21, 1965 – Lana Wachowski born as Lawrence, with sibling Lily (also a trans woman, formerly Andrew), a writing and film directing team, creators of The Matrix films, Cloud Atlas, and Jupiter Ascending.

June 21, 1967 – Carrie Preston born, American actress, producer, and director; best known for her Emmy-award-winning portrayal of Elsbeth Tasconi on the TV series The Good Wife, and in the spin-off series The Good Fight, and as Arlene Fowler on True Blood. She is the co-owner/producer of the production company Daisy 3 Pictures.

June 21, 1973 – Zuzana Čaputová born, Slovak politician, lawyer, and activist; President of Slovakia as of June 15, 2019. Čaputová is the first woman, and at age 45 the youngest, President of Slovakia. She worked in Perzinok city government, her hometown, and was leader of a successful decade-long legal battle and community campaign against authorization of a toxic landfill in Perzinok, for which she was awarded the 2016 Goldman Environmental Prize.

June 21, 1974 – Natasha Desborough born, British radio presenter, producer, and author. In 2003, she hosted Xfm London’s late night Chill Out Room, then was co-presenter of Breakfast Session. Author of Parental Advisory Manual, Weirdos Vs Quimboids, and Weirdos Vs Bumskulls.

June 21, 2001 – Mexican artist Frida Kahlo becomes the first Hispanic woman to be honored on a U.S. postage stamp.

June 21, 2019 – The International Labour Organization adopted a new convention and recommendation to combat violence and harassment at work. The Violence and Harassment Convention and Violence and Harassment Recommendation recognizes that violence and harassment at work are human rights violations and threaten equal opportunities. The Convention recognizes that violence and harassment in the workplace “can constitute a human rights violation or abuse … is a threat to equal opportunities, is unacceptable and incompatible with decent work.” It defines “violence and harassment” as behaviours, practices, or threats “that aim at, result in, or are likely to result in physical, psychological, sexual or economic harm.” It reminds member States they have a responsibility to promote a “general environment of zero tolerance.” The new international labour standard aims to protect workers and employees, irrespective of their contractual status, and includes persons in training, interns, and apprentices, workers whose employment has been terminated, volunteers, job seekers, and job applicants. It recognizes that “individuals exercising the authority, duties or responsibilities of an employer” can also be subjected to violence and harassment.

June 21, 2019 – In a New York magazine cover story, writer E. Jean Carroll, an advice columnist for Elle Magazine at the time she encountered Donald Trump in Bergdorf Goodman’s Manhattan store sometime in late 1995 or early 1996. Trump was married to Marla Maples at the time. Carroll alleges that Trump assaulted her in a store dressing room after he had asked her for advice on a present to buy a female friend. He selected a “lacy see-through bodysuit of lilac gray” and asked her to model it for him; she quipped back that he should try it on. When they reached the dressing room, Carroll alleges that Trump lunged at her and over the next three minutes sexually assaulted her. “He seizes both my arms and pushes me up against the wall a second time, and, as I become aware of how large he is, he holds me against the wall with his shoulder and jams his hand under my coat dress and pulls down my tights,” she writes. In a “colossal struggle” he unzipped his trousers and forced his fingers around her genitals and thrusting his penis “halfway – or completely, I’m not certain – inside me.” She managed to force him off her, Carroll alleges, open the door of the dressing room and flee. Trump’s response was that he “never met this person in my life,” but a photograph of an event where they are standing near each other in a group had been publish in newspapers. She filed a defamation suit against him, saying Trump, “ridiculed my reputation, laughed at my looks, & dragged me through the mud.” In February, 2020, Carroll was fired from the position she had held at Elle magazine for 36 years. Carroll says she was fired because Trump smeared her professional reputation. In May 2023, a jury found that Trump had sexually assaulted her, and awarded Carroll $5 million for battery and defamation.

June 21, 2020 – Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (Democrat-California) said that Americans are owed answers about Donald Trump’s claim that robust testing for Covid-19 turns up too many cases, which he made during his rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, saying, “When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down, please.’ They test and they test.” Pelosi called for answers from White House coronavirus task force members expected to testify in front of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on June 23. “The American people are owed answers about why President Trump wants less testing when experts say much more is needed,” she said in a statement. A Biden campaign statement responded, “This virus has killed nearly 120,000 Americans and cost tens of millions their jobs, in large part because this president could not and would not mobilize testing as quickly as we needed it. To hear him say tonight that he has ordered testing slowed — a transparent attempt to make the numbers look better — is appalling.”

June 21, 2021 – In France, Valérie Bacot’s trial for murdering her husband began. He was previously her stepfather. She admitted to shooting him. She testified that Daniel “Dany” Polette made her life hell from the day he raped her when she was 12, to the day he died 24 years later while prostituting her. She had four children with her alleged abuser, and said she was convinced he would kill them all. She said everyone knew he was a violent sexual predator, but even after her children went to the police – twice – to report the abuse, they were told to tell their terrified mother to come in herself. France has one of the highest rates of femicide in Europe. In the same week as her trial began, three women were killed by former partners, and at least 55 other French women had been killed by current or ex partners by June of 2021. Polette pimped his wife in the back of his car that he fitted with a mattress, while spying on her with clients and giving her instructions via an earpiece. He had a pistol just in case a client turned nasty. If Bacot didn’t do what he demanded, he beat her, she told investigators. On March 13, 2016, after she was raped by a client, she took the pistol that her husband had hidden between the car seats and shot him in the head. She was sentenced to four years in prison, with three years suspended. Since she had already been in pre-trial detention for a year, she was free to return home. Three of her children were tried for helping to hide the body, and given six month suspended sentences.

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June 22, 1427 – Lucrezia Tornabuoni born, Italian political advisor to her husband Piero Cosimo de’ Medici and her son, Lorenzo ‘the Magnificent,’ during their de facto rule of Florence and the Florentine Republic. She supported convents, widows, orphans, and was a patron of the arts, especially poets. She also wrote religious stories, plays, and poetry.

June 22, 1450 – Eleanor of Naples born, Duchess of Ferrara (1471-1493) by marriage to Ercole d’Este; she served as regent (1482-1484) while her husband was at war with the Republic of Venice. Known for her subtle but effective handling of politics, sage counsel, and common sense. She was also a patron of the Arts, and several authors dedicated their books to her.

June 22, 1865 – ‘Minnie’ Evangeline Jordon born, American dentist; opened her practice in Los Angeles after graduating from the University of California Berkeley’s school of dentistry. In 1909, she became the first U.S. dentist to specialize in pediatric dentistry, and gave lectures on the importance of childhood development of teeth to overall health. She was a founder and first president of the Federation of American Women Dentists, and a founder of the American Society of Dentistry for Children. She also wrote the first textbook on periodontics in 1925, Operative Dentistry for Children.

June 22, 1869 – Caroline O’Day born, American politician, third woman and first female Democrat elected to Congress from New York (1935-1943); co-sponsor of Wagner-O’Day Act, predating the expanded Javits-Wagner-O’Day Act, requiring all federal agencies to purchase specified supplies and services from nonprofit agencies employing people with significant disabilities, such as blindness.

June 22, 1879 – Eva Germaine Rimington Taylor born, English geographer, historian of science, and author; the first woman to hold an academic chair of geography in the UK.

June 22, 1906 – Anne Morrow Lindbergh born, American author of fiction and non-fiction; noted for Gift from the Sea; married to aviator Charles Lindbergh; in 1930, she was the first American woman to earn a first-class glider pilot’s license. From the mid-1930s up until Pearl Harbor, the Lindberghs both advocated American isolationism and made some pro-Hitler statements which tarnished their images. Anne Lindbergh began to redeem herself through her writing in the 1950s, especially with the publication of Gift from the Sea in 1955, which became a national bestseller.

June 22, 1909 – Katherine Dunham born, American dancer, choreographer, author, educator, and activist, called “matriarch and queen mother of black dance.” Directed the Katherine Dunham Dance Company for almost 30 years.

June 22, 1914 – Mei Zhi born, Chinese author and essayist; joined the League of Left-Wing Writers in Shanghai in 1932; she and her husband Hu Fen were arrested in 1955 for “counter-revolutionary activities.” Her “crime” was that she had transcribed one of her husband’s books. She was in prison until 1961. Her husband wasn’t released in 1965, and they both remained under surveillance by the Public Security Department. At the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, they were sent to a prison camp that produced tea. Hu was imprisoned, fell ill, and she was taken to the prison to nurse him. In 1979, Mei was “rehabilitated” and then given permission to take Hu to Beijing for treatment of his increasing mental illness, where he died in 1985. She wrote memoirs of his imprisonment, and published collections of children’s stories. Zhi joined the China Writer’s Association in 1982, which offered some protection of writer’s rights, but also enforced “acceptable literary norms.”

June 22, 1918 – Dame Cicely Saunders born, English nurse, social worker, physician, and writer; played a major role in the birth of the Hospice movement, highlighting palliative care, especially pain management; founded a charity to promote research in improving the care and treatment of patients with progressive illnesses.

June 22, 1921 – Barbara Vucanovich born, American politician, first woman to represent Nevada in U. S. House of Representatives (Republican-Nevada, 1983-1997), advocate for breast-cancer awareness.

June 22, 1929 – Rose Kushner born, journalist and medical writer; challenged the wide-spread practice in the 1970s of performing a tumor biopsy and a radical mastectomy as one surgery while the patient was under anesthesia. After her own experience with breast cancer, and her struggle to find a doctor who would listen to her concerns, she wrote Breast Cancer: A Personal History and Investigative Report in 1975, a ground-breaking book which made extensive medical information and advice available to patients, and included strong criticism of combining the biopsy and radical mastectomy surgery as a single procedure. The book was strongly endorsed by Dr. Thomas Dao, the surgeon who had performed the modified radical mastectomy on Kushner, after a separate biopsy had determined her tumor was cancerous. With Dorothy Johnson, Kushner established the Breast Cancer Advisory Center, a telephone hotline to provide patients with information on breast cancer and their options. Kushner persisted, in spite of strong push-back from the medical establishment, and began to influence both public and official opinion. In 1977, she was the only non-medical professional appointed to the ten-member National Institutes of Health panel which evaluated treatment options for primary breast cancer. In 1979, the panel issued its conclusion that the Halsted radical mastectomy should no longer be the standard treatment for suspected cases of breast cancer, instead recommending total simple mastectomy as the primary surgical treatment. Kushner also convinced the panel to include a statement calling for an end to the one-step surgical procedure. Dr. Bruce Chabner of the National Cancer Institute said she was “probably the single most important person” in ending the practice of one-step surgery for breast cancer, because of her persistence and because she brought medical information to a wide public audience that otherwise was unaware of their options. She died at age 61 of breast cancer in 1990.

June 22, 1933 – Dianne Feinstein born, American politician, San Francisco’s first woman Mayor (1978-1988); U. S. Senator (Democrat-California, 1992 to present); first woman to chair the Senate Rules Committee (2007–2009) and the Select Committee on Intelligence (2009- 2015).

June 22, 1939 – Ada E. Yonath born, Israeli scientist and crystallographer; pioneering work on structure of the ribosome was rewarded by a 2009 Nobel Prize for Chemistry shared with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A. Steitz; director of Center for Biomolecular Structure at the Weizmann Institute of Science.

June 22, 1940 – Joan Busfield born, British sociologist, psychologist, and author; President of the British Sociological Association (2003-2005); noted for research on mental disorders; Managing madness: changing ideas and practice, Men, women, and madness: understanding gender and mental disorder, and Mental Illness.

June 22, 1940 – Dame Esther Rantzen born, English journalist and presenter of That’s Life! (1973-1994); founder of the child protection charity ChildLine in 1986, and The Silver Line, to combat loneliness, in 2012.

June 22, 1941 – Terttu Savola born, Finnish Politician, chair of the For the Poor party. Member of the Espoo city council since 2008), she was her party’s first member to win a council seat. She is an ambassador for human rights and children’s rights in the Finnish UN alliance, and a lecturer for the Finnish Refuge Help Association. Savola is also the editor of the Plari newspaper published by the Southern Ostrobothnians (a regional group) in Helsinki.

June 22, 1946 – Sheila Hollins born, Baroness Hollins, British professor of psychiatry of learning disability; Royal College of Psychiatrists president (2005-2008); crossbench Life Peer in the House of Lords since 2010; President of the British Medical Association (2012-2013).

June 22, 1947 – Octavia E. Butler born, African American science fiction author; multiple winner of Hugo and Nebula awards. Noted for Kindred; Parable of the Talents; Bloodchild; and Speech Sounds. Butler died at age 58 in 2006 of a stroke, and was posthumously inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2010.

June 22, 1949 – Meryl Streep born, American actress, nominated for a record 21 Academy Awards, and winner of three Oscars; known for supporting liberal political causes and gender equality.

June 22, 1949 – Elizabeth Warren born, American Democratic politician; U.S Senator from Massachusetts since 2013; FDIC Advisory Committee on Economic Inclusion (2006-2010); Law School professor whose research and analysis established her expertise in bankruptcy and commercial law; among other universities, she taught at Harvard Law School (1992 and 1995-2011).

June 22, 1953 – Cyndi Lauper born, American singer-songwriter and LGBTQ activist; in 2012, she started True Colors United to address youth homelessness because up to 40% of American youth who identify as LGBT end up homeless. The True Colors Residence in New York City offers temporary shelter and job placement assistance.

June 22, 1955 – Christine Orengo born, British Professor of Bioinformatics at University College London; worked on protein structure, particularly the CATH (Protein Structure Classification) database. Earned a Chemical Physics degree at the University of Bristol, then studied Medical Physics. Awarded a Master of Science degree (1977) for research on disruption of iron metabolism in laboratory rats with Yoshida sarcomas. Earned a Ph.D. (1984) for research on the redox (a chemical reaction) properties of ions in proteins. She did research at the National Institute for Medical Research until 1990. Joined the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at University College London in 1995, and was awarded a Medical Research Council (MRC) Senior Fellowship in Bioinformatics. Promoted to Professor of Bioinformatics in 2002.

June 22, 1964 – Amy Brenneman born, American actress, writer, and producer; star of the television drama Judging Amy (1999-2005). She is pro-choice, and one of the 5,000 who signed the “We Had Abortions” petition in the October 2006 issue of Ms. Magazine. She is also a strong supporter of more restrictive gun laws, hosting the 2009 Target for a Safe America gala in Los Angeles for the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

June 22, 1968 – Miri Yu born in Yokohama, Zainichi Korean playwright, novelist, and essayist. Zainichi Koreans are Korean naturalized citizens of Japan who immigrated to Japan before 1945, or are the descendants of those immigrants. She writes in Japanese, her first language, but is a citizen of South Korea.

June 22, 1972 – Wangechi Mutu born in Kenya, Kenyan-American artist and sculptor, who lives and works in New York. Noted for combining themes of gender, race, and personal identity in her work. She creates complex collages, sculpture, videos, and performance art.

June 22, 1974 – Jo Cox born, British Labour Member of Parliament (2015-2016); she was just a few days short of her 42nd birthday when she was assassinated on June 16, 2016, by a far-right extremist who shot and stabbed her as she was arriving for a meeting with constituents. Cox was a supporter of women’s and human rights, aid to refugees from war in the Middle East, a campaigner for resolution of the Syrian Civil War, and an advocate for Britain to remain in the European Union. She worked for Oxfam (2001-2015), rising to head of policy and advocacy at Oxfam GB, before entering politics.

June 22, 1980 – Pope John Paul II beatified Kateri Tekakwitha, a Mohawk woman (1656-1680) living in the Albany area and later near Montreal; first Native American beatified by the Roman Catholic Church. Left an orphan by a smallpox epidemic that killed the rest of her family (and scarred her face) she grew up in contact with Jesuit missionaries and was baptized at age 19. Her spirituality and early death led to her reputation growing among Catholics.

June 22, 2020 – Authors Ugla Stefanía Kristjönudóttir Jónsdóttir, Fox Fisher, Drew Davies, and a fourth unnamed author, ended their representation by the Blair Partnership, (J.K. Rowling’s literary agency), addusing Blair of declining to issue a public statement supporting transgender rights. Jónsdóttir, Fisher, and Davies, said in a statement, “We felt that they were unable to commit to any action that we thought was appropriate and meaningful … Freedom of speech can only be upheld if the structural inequalities that hinder equal opportunities for underrepresented groups are challenged and changed.” A Blair spokeswoman said the agency would always champion diverse voices and believe in freedom of speech for all, but it was not willing to have staff “re-educated” to meet demands by a small group of clients. Jónsdóttir, co-author of Trans Teen Survival Guide, said, “We tried speaking with them internally before going public … As trans people it’s just a matter of values … We don’t want to be associated with an agency that doesn’t value the same things that we do.”

June 22, 2021 – Karona Gould, Canada’s Minister of International Development, attended the Generation Equality Forum Action Coalition on Feminist Movements and Leadership. She said Canada signed up for a leadership role “because Feminist organizations are on the frontlines in their communities as we have seen throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. They have been supporting the poorest and most vulnerable, fighting and advocating to ensure that those dependent on services, such as women’s shelters, continue to have access. These are the people on the ground who are making change happen on a day-to-day basis, and we must support them … we see challenges and barriers to feminist movements and leadership that we want to help mitigate … A big challenge is funding. Less than 1 per cent of all gender-focused aid goes towards feminist organizations – we simply need more. Another serious challenge is the pushback against gender equality around the world. This makes supporting civil society and developing allyship and solidarity across countries even more important … Canada has invested CAD 300 million in the Equality Fund, which is a unique partnership between civil society, philanthropy and the private sector, providing long-term sustainable funding to women’s rights and feminist organizations around the world …”

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June 23, 1456 – Margaret of Denmark born, Queen consort of Scotland (1469-1486), by marriage to King James III; their betrothal ended a feud between Denmark and Scotland over Scotland’s arrears in taxes owed to Denmark for the Hebrides and Isle of Man. Their marriage in 1469 cancelled the Scottish debt. She was 13 years old, and James was 17 or 18. She was popular in Scotland, widely regarded as beautiful, gentle, sensible, and intelligent. Some historians thought her far better qualified to rule than her husband, who tried to form alliances with the wrong factions at the wrong times, and showed marked favoritism to lesser members of the court, alienating more powerful nobles. Their marriage was unhappy, in part because she found him unattractive, but also because he favored their second son, confusingly also named James, over their eldest son, James IV. James III’s machinations to wrest the Earldom of Ross from John MacDonald to bestow it on his favorite son, even accusing MacDonald of treason, created the crisis of 1482, compounded by an English invasion. The King, arrested by his disaffected nobles, and imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle, was deprived of power for months, until freed by his uncles. Although politically Margaret worked for his reinstatement, she showed far greater interest in their three sons’ welfare than his, causing a permanent estrangement. After James was reinstated, he lived in Edinburgh, and Margaret lived in Stirling Castle with her sons. She fell ill and died in 1486, at the age of 30. James III was killed in 1488, at the Battle of Sauchieburn, won by his still disaffected and rebellious nobles, who were championing the heir, James IV, who was their somewhat reluctant “guest.”

June 23, 1763 – Joséphine (Tascher de la Pagerie) de Beauharnais born, first wife of Napoléon Bonaparte, and Empress of the French (1804-1810) until their marriage was annulled so he could marry a princess who could give him an heir. Joséphine’s first husband, Alexandre, Viscount de Beauharnais, was guillotined during the Reign of Terror. A noted patron of the Arts, she also collected roses from all over the world for her garden at Château de Malmaison. Her daughter with Alexandre, Hortense de Beauharnais, became Queen consort of Holland, and the mother of Napoléon III.

Joséphine de Beauharnais — by Andrea Appiani

June 23, 1826 – Anne McDowell born, American editor, journalist, champion of working women’s rights; founder and publisher of the Woman’s Advocate (1855-1860), the first weekly U.S. newspaper staffed completely by women, including typesetters and printers, and written by and for women. The paper’s stated goal was “the elevation of the female industrial class.” McDowell wasn’t concerned with woman’s suffrage, but instead fought for education, more employment opportunities, and equal pay. She paid her employees the same wages that men in their jobs earned. When the Advocate went out of business in 1860 because costs were increasing faster than subscribers, McDowell became women’s department editor of the Philadelphia Sunday Dispatch (1860-1871), one of the first women department heads in the newspaper field. She left the Dispatch to become editor of the Philadelphia Sunday Republic; also founded an organization in 1884 to secure sickness and death benefits for employees of Wanamaker’s department store, and established the McDowell Free Library for Wanamaker’s women employees. She died in 1901.

June 23, 1879 – Huda Sha’arawi born, pioneering Egyptian feminist leader and nationalist; secluded in a harem as a child, at 13 she was given in marriage to her cousin, but they separated, and she learned from women teachers to read the Quran, and study Islamic subjects. She wrote poetry in Arabic and French. Sha’arawi resented women’s restriction to home or harem, and organized lectures for women-only audiences. Many women from wealthy families who attended were in a public place for the first time in their lives. Sha’arawi raised money to help poor Egyptian women, and founded a school for girls, emphasizing academic subjects. She co-founded the Union of Educated Egyptian Women in 1914. After WWI, she helped organize the largest demonstration by Egyptian women against British rule. Sha’awarwi stopped wearing the veil in public after her husband’s death in 1922, and by the 1930s, most women in Egypt had followed her example. In 1923, she founded and was the first president of the Egyptian Feminist Union, publishing the feminist magazine L’Egyptienne.

June 23, 1889 – Anna Akhmatova born, pseudonym for Russian poet Anna Andreyevna Gorenko, an acclaimed writer noted for remaining in the Soviet Union and writing about the terrors of living under Stalinism.

June 23, 1889 – Verena Holmes born, English mechanical engineer and inventor, specializing in marine and locomotive engines. In 1924, she was the first woman elected to the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (but wasn’t made a full member until the 1940s), and an associate member of the Institution of Marine Engineers. Strongly supporting women in engineering, she was an early member of the Women’s Engineering Society, and elected the society’s president in 1931. Her patents include the Holmes and Wingfield pneumo-thorax apparatus for treating patients with tuberculosis, a surgeon’s headlamp, a poppet valve for steam locomotives, rotary valves for internal combustion engines, and several other patents for medical devices and engine components. During WWII, she worked on naval weaponry, trained women for munitions work, and served as headquarters technical officer with the Ministry of Labour (1940-1944). In 1946, she founded the firm of Holmes and Leather, which employed only women, and published a booklet, Training and Opportunities for Women in Engineering. International Women in Engineering Day was set on her birthday.

June 23, 1898 – Winifred Holtby born, English novelist, poet, journalist, ardent feminist, socialist, and pacifist. A prolific writer for over 20 newspapers and magazines, including the Manchester Guardian, and Time and Tide (a feminist journal). Her novel, South Riding, was published in 1936, the year after her death at age 37 from kidney disease.

June 23, 1900 – Blanche W. Noyes born, American aviation pioneer, one of the first 10 women to earn a pilot’s license (1929). Two months after earning her license, she was among 20 competitors in the inaugural Women’s Air Derby, flying from Santa Monica CA to Cleveland OH. Her plane caught fire in mid-air near Pecos TX, and her landing gear was damaged, but she put out the fire, made repairs, and continued to race, coming in fourth in the heavy class. In 1936, the first year women were allowed to compete against men, she was co-pilot to Louise Thaden, and they won the Bendix Trophy Race, setting a world record of 14 hours, 55 minutes flying from New York City to Los Angeles CA in a Beechwood C17R Staggerwing plane. In 1936, she one of the WPA women pilots hired to aid aerial navigation by painting the name of the nearest town at 15-mile intervals on prominent buildings or clear ground, but after U.S. entry into WWII in 1941, they had to black out the roughly 13,000 sites they had marked. After the war, she oversaw the air marking division of the Civil Aeronautics Administration, in restoring and adding navigational aids, the only woman for several years allowed to fly a government plane.

June 23, 1915 – Frances Gabe born, American artist, inventor, and designer-builder of the ‘Self-Cleaning House.’ Granted a patent for the concept, and 25 additional patents for individual inventions she incorporated into the design. Erma Bombeck jestingly declared in her column that Gabe’s likeness should be added to Mount Rushmore.

June 23, 1918 – Madeleine Parent born, Canadian labour leader and feminist, advocate for aboriginal rights, worked to establish the Canadian Textile and Chemical Union and the Confederation of Canadian Unions.

June 23, 1921 – Jeanne M. Holm born, first woman promoted to Major General (1973) in the U.S. Air Force.

June 23, 1923 – Giuseppina Tuissi born, Italian communist and WWII partisan, of the 52^nd Brigata Garibaldi “Luigi Clerici.” Worked with ‘Captain Neri’ (Luigi Canali). Arrested, interrogated, and tortured by the Gestapo in January 1945, but released in March. Both she and ‘Neri’ witnessed the arrest and execution of Benito Mussolini in April. Accused by a Garibaldi Brigade regional commander of revealing names of partisans during torture, she was detained, and told Canali had been executed by a partisan tribunal, but then released. She went to Milan in May 1945, with Canali’s sister, to find out more about Luigi’s death. Unable to get answers, she continued to investigate, even after being threatened. Tuissi disappeared on June 23, 1945, her 22^nd birthday. Her presumed murder is still unsolved.

June 23, 1926 – Magda Herzberger born, Romanian Jewish author, poet, composer, and Holocaust survivor. Her autobiography, Survival, and her composition, Requiem, honor the victims of the Holocaust.

Magda Herzberger with parents circa 1930 and as adult

June 23, 1926 – Annette Mbaye d’Erneville born, Senegalese writer, poet, teacher, journalist, and radio programme director for Radio Senegal. She championed women’s issues, and launched Awa magazine in 1963, the first francophone publication for African women. Author of children’s literature and poetry, and known for Poèmes africains and La Bague de cuivre et d’argent (The Copper and Silver Ring), which won prix Jeune Afrique in 1961.

June 23, 1930 – Marie-Thérèse Houphouët-Boigny born, First Lady of Côte d’Ivoire (1962-1993), and philanthropist; in 1987, she founded the N’Daya International Foundation, dedicated to improving the health, welfare, and education of children in Africa. In 1990, she helped create and produce a cartoon, Kimboo, to offer cartoon heroes for African children.

June 23, 1940 – Wilma Rudolph born, African American sprinter, Olympic world-record-holder, and track and field icon. She won three gold medals and a bronze in two Olympics, in 1956 in Melbourne and 1960 in Rome. Because of intense coverage of the Summer Olympics, she was one of the highest-profile Black women in the world, elevating women’s track and field in America, and a role model for African American women and Olympic women athletes, and a leader in civil rights and women’s rights. In 1962, she retired from participation in sports, and became a teacher and a coach. She died from cancer in 1994.

June 23, 1943 – Ellyn Kaschak born, American clinical psychologist, a pioneer in feminist psychology; author of Engendered Lives: A New Psychology of Women’s Experience, and editor of the academic journal, Women & Therapy. Honored with the 2004 Distinguished Leadership Award by the Committee on Women in Psychology of the American Psychological Association.

June 23, 1951 – Michèle Mouton born, French rally driver with the Audi factory team that won four victories in the World Rally Championship. She was runner-up in the Drivers’ World Championship in 1982; first woman president of the Women and Motor Sport Commission of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA); inducted into the Rally Hall of Fame in 2012.

June 23, 1957 – Frances McDormand born, American actress, winner of two Academy Awards, two Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Tony Award, making her one of the few winners of acting’s “Triple Crown.” She is also one of the few women to play God, in the 2019 television miniseries Good Omens, based on the novel by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.

June 23, 1960 – The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved use of Searle’s combined oral contraceptive pill, Enovid, as a contraceptive. It had been approved in 1957 for treating menstrual disorders.

June 23, 1965 – Sylvia Mathews Burwell born, American executive in academic and governmental sectors; in 2017, she was the first woman President of American University in Washington DC; and served as U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (2014-2017).

June 23, 1972 – President Nixon signed Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, a major legislation initiative for women and girls. Title IX guarantees equal access and equal opportunity in education: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”

June 23, 2005 – International Widows Day was launched by the Loomba Foundation. Women are more likely to outlive their spouses, but are less likely to remarry than men. Of an estimated 245 million widows worldwide, at least 115 million live in poverty, suffering social stigma and economic deprivation purely because their husbands died. In 2010, the UN General Assembly formally adopted June 23 as International Widows Day.

June 23, 2013 – The first International Women in Engineering Day. In 2019, the 100th Anniversary of the Women’s Engineering Society was also celebrated in the UK.

June 23, 2018 – At a campaign rally for Senator Dean Heller (Republican-Nevada) in Las Vegas, Donald Trump urged his audience to vote against Heller’s opponent, Representative Jacky Rosen (Democrat-Nevada), calling her “Wacky Jacky.” Trump claimed a “vote for her is a vote for increased taxes … Weak borders. It is really a vote for crime.” Rosen, endorsed by Barack Obama and Joe Biden, defeated Dean Heller, the only challenger in the 2018 election to defeat a Republican incumbent U.S. Senator.

June 23, 2019 – Emily Eavis, Glastonbury Festival organiser, says some men in the music industry still refuse to deal with her after her father passed her responsibility for overseeing the lineup. Eavis, 40, has booked acts at Glastonbury for half her life, but she’s often the only woman in meetings with music moguls. Some male executives insist on speaking to her father, Michael Eavis, 83, who co-created the festival at the family’s Worthy Farm in Somerset. “The live music world has been so male-dominated,” she told BBC Radio 4. “I go to meetings with just tables of men. Some were great, and some just refused to accept that they had to deal with me.” Eavis aims to create an equal gender balance of performers. “We are working toward 50/50. Some years it’s 60/40. It’s a challenge for us and we’ve really taken it on and I’m always totally conscious every day that the gender balance should be right.” Glastonbury, a five-day festival, started as the Pilton Festival in 1970. Most of their profits are donated to charities, including local charity and community groups, and paying for the purchase and restoration of the 14^th century Tithe Barn in Pilton. The 2020 festival was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

June 23, 2020 – Donald Trump’s family tried to block publication his niece Mary Trump’s tell-all book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, due to be published July 28 by Simon & Schuster. The author is the daughter of Trump’s late brother, Fred Trump Jr. Trump’s younger brother, Robert Trump, requested a temporary restraining order, saying his niece violated a nondisclosure agreement signed to settle the estate of Fred Trump Sr. Mary Trump’s lawyer said the family was violating the First Amendment by trying to “suppress” an important book. A judge rejected the family’s attempt to stop publication on jurisdictional grounds. On appeal, a State Supreme Court judge denied an injunction against publication, saying the nondisclosure agreement she signed should have had “more clarity.” He also cited the “potential enormous cost and logistical nightmare” in stopping the publication and recalling hundreds of thousands of books, and referenced the ruling in a lawsuit to stop publication of John Bolton’s tell-all, The Room Where It Happened, quoting, “By the looks of it the horse is not just out of the barn, it is out of the country.”

June 23, 2021 – The Royal Academy of Arts in London apologised to Jess de Walhs, an embroidery artist, for removing her work from its gift shop after it branded her views as transphobic on social media, calling its initial decision a “betrayal” of its commitment to freedom of speech. The Academy said it mishandled the situation and that its internal communications failed, leading to De Wahls hearing about her work being pulled via social media. De Wahl’s work was removed after a 2019 comment on her website was flagged, “I have no issue with somebody who feels more comfortable expressing themselves as if they are the other sex (or in whatever way they please for that matter). However, I cannot accept people’s unsubstantiated assertions that they are in fact the opposite sex to when they were born and deserve to be extended the same rights as if they were born as such.” After the Academy’s apology to de Walhs, LGBTQ rights campaigner Peter Tatchell responded in a Guardian interview: “Trans women are different from other women, but being a different kind of woman is perfectly valid and no justification for the denial of their identity. If an artist denied Jewish, black or gay people’s identity, most people would say that the Royal Academy would be right to remove their works from the gift shop. But when Jess denies trans people’s identity, she and other trans critics say that it’s her right to free speech and she should not be penalised. This smacks of double standards.”

**Jess de Walhs with work that was removed then restored to the academy’s gift shop**

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Sources

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The Feminist Cats Learn About
a Pioneer of LGBTQ+ Pride Month

Brenda Howard born December 24, 1946, in the Bronx, New York; American bisexual rights activist and feminist. She was active in the 1960s anti-war movement, but critical of its domination by men, and became involved in the feminist movement. She also joined the Gay Liberation Front, helped plan LGBT rights actions, and chaired the Gay Activists Alliance’s Speakers Bureau for several years. In 1970, she was dubbed the “Mother of Pride” for originating the idea of a week-long series of events around Pride Day, the anniversary of Stonewall, which became the genesis of the annual LGBTQ+ Pride celebrations now held worldwide.

Howard was active in the Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights which helped get the New York City’s Gay rights law passed in 1986. In 1987, she participated in the March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, and a New York Area Bisexual Network founding member, helping co-ordinate services to the region’s growing Bisexual community. She was co-chair of the leather contingent of the 1993 March on Washington for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Rights, and lobbied for including “Bisexuals” in the title. She was also on the Stonewall 25 New York Host Committee.

Howard died of colon cancer at age 58 in June 2005. The Brenda Howard Memorial Award was created by the Queens NY Chapter of PFLAG to recognize individuals who are positive and visible role models for bisexuals and the entire LGBT community.

June 2023 – Women Trailblazers and Activists – 6-16 thru 6-23

June is Gay and Lesbian Pride Month
aka LGBTQ+ Pride Month

**Trailblazing Women and Events in Our History**

Sources

The Feminist Cats Learn About
a Pioneer of LGBTQ+ Pride Month

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For those of you who want to dive deeper,
the extended list of this week’s
Women Trailblazers and Events
in Women’s History is here:

www.dailykos.com/…

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June is Gay and Lesbian Pride Monthaka LGBTQ+ Pride Month

Trailblazing Women and Events in Our History

Sources

The Feminist Cats Learn Abouta Pioneer of LGBTQ+ Pride Month

_________________________________

For those of you who want to dive deeper,the extended list of this week’sWomen Trailblazers and Eventsin Women’s History is here:

www.dailykos.com/…

Related posts:

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

June is Gay and Lesbian Pride Month
aka LGBTQ+ Pride Month

**Trailblazing Women and Events in Our History**

The Feminist Cats Learn About
a Pioneer of LGBTQ+ Pride Month

For those of you who want to dive deeper,
the extended list of this week’s
Women Trailblazers and Events
in Women’s History is here: