May 2023 – Women Trailblazers and Activists, 5-25 through 5-31

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

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May 25, 1417 – Catherine of Cleves born, Duchess of Guelders by marriage to Arnold, Duke of Guelders. When her husband punished the town of Driel, he lost much support in the duchy, and Catherine was his intermediary with the Estates of the Realm (the First Estate was the clergy, the Second Estate was the nobles, and the Third Estate was made up of the peasants and bourgeoisie). She also acted as regent when the duke went on pilgrimage to Rome and Palestine in 1450. The Hours of Catherine of Cleves, a richly decorated book of hours, was commissioned for her upon her marriage, a masterpiece of Northern European illumination, including a painting of her kneeling before the Virgin and Child. It went missing for 400 years, but resurfaced in 1856, when it was offered for sale by a Parisian book dealer.

CatherineofClevesinherBookofHours-DuchessofGuelders.jpg — Catherine of Cleeves — as painted in her Book of Hours

May 25, 1680 – Elizabeth Haddon born, American colonialist and Quaker; founder of Haddon Township and Haddonfield, New Jersey; her courtship with John Estaugh is described in Longfellow’s poem “Elizabeth” from Tales of a Wayside Inn.

May 25, 1818 – Louise de Broglie born, Countess d’Haussonville, French essayist and biographer; granddaughter of famed saloniste and novelist Germaine de Staël. Known for being independent, liberal, and outspoken. She wrote biographical sketches and biographies of Marguerite of Valois, Irish nationalist Robert Emmet, literary critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, and Lord Byron (a two volume work, which she based in part on her grandmother’s observations and correspondence with Byron).

LouisedeBroglie-ComtessedHaussonville-byJean-AugusteIngres.jpg — Louise de Broglie, Comtesse d’Haussonville —
by Jean-Auguste Ingres

May 25, 1846 – Princess Helena of the United Kingdom born, founding member of the British Red Cross Society, the Royal School of Needlework, and president of the Royal British Nurses’ Association.

May 25, 1869 – Mathilde Verne born, English pianist, author, and teacher of Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (future wife of King George VI, mother of Queen Elizabeth II, and HM the Queen Mother). Verne died at the Savoy in London in 1936 at age 67, surrounded by friends during a party to launch her book, Chords of Remembrance.

May 25, 1886 – Leta Stetter Hollingworth born, American psychologist; pioneer in the study of the psychology of women, and in clinical and educational psychology. Her 1916 dissertation was a study of women’s supposed mental incapacity during menstruation, called at the time, “functional periodicity.” She tested both women’s and men’s performance on various cognitive, perceptual, and motor tasks every day for three months, and concluded there was no empirical evidence linking decreased performance with phases of the menstrual cycle. She was New York City’s first civil service psychologist and was chief of the psychological lab at Bellevue Hospital. Also known for her pioneering work with exceptional children.

May 25, 1887 – Sue Shelton White born, American feminist leader, lawyer, and editor of the National Woman’s Party’s newspaper, The Suffragist. She was arrested in 1919 for burning a paper effigy of Woodrow Wilson during a protest in front of the White House – after her release from jail, she went with other arrestees on a train tour of the U.S. they called the “Prison Special” to keep the suffrage issue before the public. She earned a law degree in 1923, and helped to draft the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). She also worked for the Democratic National Committee and Eleanor Roosevelt, and was on the legal staff for the Social Security Administration (1935), then became the principal attorney for the Federal Security Agency, until she was diagnosed with cancer. She died in 1943 at age 55.

May 25, 1889 – Lillie Mae Carroll Jackson born, an early African American leader in the civil rights movement; she organized the Baltimore branch of the NAACP, and was a pioneer in non-violent resistance. In the 1930s, she launched the City-Wide Young Peoples’ Forum with her daughter Juanita, who was the first African-American woman to practice law in Maryland. The forum conducted a campaign to end racial segregation, starting in 1931 with a “Buy Where You Can Work” grassroots boycott, which became a blueprint for boycotts in other cities.

May 25, 1905 – Dorothy Porter Wesley born, African American librarian, bibliographer, and curator who worked on the world-class research collection at the Moorland-Springarn Research Center at Howard University; she helped make it a world renowned resource on the history and culture of African-Americans.

May 25, 1909 – Marie Menken born as Marie Menkevicius, experimental filmmaker and painter; she used a hand-held camera, and incorporated collage into her films. Her film Glimpse of the Garden was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.

May 25, 1911 – Mary Keyserling born, American economist and moderate feminist; Director of the Women’s Bureau of the Labor Department (1964-1969); Director of the Foreign Economic Administration’s Liberated Areas Division (1943–1945); Executive Director of the National Consumers’ League (1938), and personal adviser to Eleanor Roosevelt at the Office of Civilian Defense. Starting in the early 1930s, Keyserling was a part of a network of women experts and activists trying to resolve social inequalities in gender, class, and race. Keyserling believed sex discrimination to be more serious than race discrimination. She was an advocate for women and their rights while heading the Women’s Bureau, and fought for women to be included in the War on Poverty Program. Keyserling was one of many women working in the federal government who were challenged over their loyalty from 1930s to 1950s. In 1948, Keyserling faced loyalty hearings concerning communist ties and activities, but these accusations were more connected to her brother-in-law, George Marshall. She had to take a leave of absence from her job in the United States’ Commerce Department until being found innocent of being a communist. In 1952, Joseph McCarthy accused her of being a former member of ten communist groups, and later claimed Keyserling had joined the Communist Party, then had perjured herself when she denied that she had not taken part in communist activities. Keyserling was found guilty by the Commerce Department loyalty board. This decision was overturned in 1953, but Keyserling retired from government service until she returned as director of the Women’s Bureau in 1964. She died in 1997 at age 85.

May 25, 1914 – Dorothy Sarnoff born, American operatic soprano and musical theatre singer-actress. After retiring from the stage, Sarnoff began a second career as a self-help author and image consultant, focusing on speech. Her books include Speech Can Change Your Life and Never Be Nervous Again.

May 25, 1925 – Rosario Castellanos born, Mexican poet and author; her work deals with cultural and gender oppression; one of Mexico’s most important 20th century literary figures.

May 25, 1926 – Phyllis Gotlieb born, Canadian science fiction novelist and poet; she won the Prix Aurora Award for Best Novel in 1982 for her novel A Judgment of Dragons. Much of Gotlieb’s poetry is collected in Red Blood Black Ink White Paper: New and Selected Poems 1961-2001.

May 25, 1928 – Mary Wells Lawrence born, American businesswoman, a founder of the Wells Rich Greene advertising agency. She was the first woman CEO of a NY Stock Exchange-listed company, and the first woman executive of a U.S. advertising firm. In 2008, she was one of the five founders of wowOwow, a website created, owned, and written by women for women.

May 25, 1929 – Beverly Sills born, leading American lyric coloratura soprano; She made her professional debut in 1945; after a remarkable international career, Sills retired from the stage in 1980, and became the New York City Opera’s general manager, then chair of Lincoln Center and the Metropolitan Opera. She died at age in 2007.

May 25, 1938 – Margaret Forster born, English novelist, biographer, and historian; best known for her novel Georgy Girl.

May 25, 1941 – Uta Frith born, German developmental psychologist and author, pioneer in research on autism (initiated theory of mind deficit, and was one of the first to study Asperger’s syndrome). She also studied dyslexia, and was on the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience faculty at University College London. Frith advocated for the advancement of women in science, was a co-developer of the support network Science & Shopping, and co-founder of the UCL Women network. Elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2005, and as chair of the Royal Society’s Diversity Committee in 2015. She wrote about unconscious bias and its effect on which scientists receive grants.

May 25, 1947 – Catherine G. Wolf born, American psychologist, expert in human-computer interaction, and author of over 100 research articles. She has six patents related to artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction and collaboration; known for work at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York. She was diagnosed in 1997 with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS aka Lou Gehrig’s disease), but was still able to communicate via electronic sensory equipment, including a sophisticated brain-computer interface. Even with almost no voluntary physical functions remaining, she published innovative research into fine-scale abilities of ALS patients, collaborating with scientists and designers on the programs and devices she used; she died in February, 2018, at the age of 70.

May 25, 1948 – Marianne Elliott born, Irish historian and author brought up in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She’s written extensively on Irish history, including biographies of Irish republican revolutionaries Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet, and Catholics of Ulster: a history. She served on the Opsahl Commission in 1993 and co-wrote its report “A Citizens’ Inquiry,” promoting peace efforts in Northern Ireland. Awarded an OBE in 2000 for her services to Irish studies and the Northern Ireland peace process, and in 2002, elected as a Fellow of the British Academy.

May 25, 1949 – Jamaica Kincaid born in Antigua; fiction author, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer, who lives in Vermont during the summer months; professor of African and African American Studies in Residence at Harvard during the academic year. Won the 1997 Anisfield-Wolfe Book Award for The Autobiography of My Mother, the 1999 Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, and the 2000 Prix Femina étranger for My Brother.

May 25, 1953 – Eve Ensler born, American playwright, feminist, activist, and performer, best known for The Vagina Monologues, and the V-Day movement to stop violence against women.

May 25, 1958 – Dorothy Straight born, American children’s author, who wrote and illustrated her first book, How the World Began, in 1962 at the age of four, which was published in 1964, making her one of the youngest published authors in history.

May 25, 1960 – Amy Klobuchar born, American attorney, former prosecutor, Democratic politician, and author; in 2007, became the first woman elected as U.S. Senator from Minnesota; ranking member of the Senate Rules Committee (2017-2021) and its Chair since 2021. Her book, The Senator Next Door: A Memoir from the Heartland, was published in 2015.

May 25, 1972 – Octavia Spencer born, American actress and children’s book author; one of two Black actresses nominated for three Best Supporting Actress Oscars. She won for The Help in 2012, and was nominated for Hidden Figures in 2017, and The Shape of Water in 2018. She is the only Black actress nominated for two consecutive Oscars. Author of the Randi Rhodes, Ninja Detective series, about a 12-year-old girl amateur detective.

May 25, 1994 – Aly Raisman born, American two-time Olympic artistic gymnast; captain of the American “Fierce Five” gymnastics team at the 2012 London Olympics, and the “Final Five” at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics.

May 25, 2011 – After 25 seasons (1986-2011), The Oprah Winfrey Show aired its last episode. The show won 47 Daytime Emmy Awards, and holds the record as the highest-rated daytime talk show in U.S. television history.

May 25, 2018 – In the Republic of Ireland, the official results were announced on the referendum to repeal the Eighth Amendment of the Irish Constitution which had prohibited abortion in all but a few cases. The vote was 66.4% in favour of loosening the ban. The Eighth Amendment was replaced with the Thirty-Sixth Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland. The Oireachtas (Irish Parliament) passed new legislation allowing termination of pregnancy if the woman’s life or health are at serious risk, or if the foetus is determined to be likely to die from abnormalities, either before, or within 28 days of, birth. Abortion pills are illegal in Ireland, but women have succeeded in ordering them via the Internet.

May 25, 2020 – Meliha Sendic, President of the Centre of Women’s Rights, says that COVID-19 has exposed “long-standing institutional issues we have been pointing out for years.” The Centre provides legal aid and psychological support, and has expanded their outreach online on media and chat platforms between 8 a.m. and Midnight. They have also set up a distance-learning platform to educate police in Sarajevo. The Centre is one of 144 United Nations Trust Fund grantees in 69 countries and territories that are adapting their services during the Covid-19 lockdowns, which have isolated domestic violence victims with their abusers, and overwhelmed governmental health and social services systems.

May 25, 2021 – In the UK, Black Lives Matter activist Sasha Johnson was shot in the head after four men forced their way into a birthday party she was attending and a scuffle broke out. She came to prominence in 2020 during the demonstrations for racial justice that sprang up across Britain. Johnson, age 27, and a mother of two, was struck by a single bullet, and remains hospitalized after suffering catastrophic and permanent injuries. Four suspects were arrested, but in February 2022, prosecutor Mark Heywood QC said the case against them could not go ahead for reasons that could not be detailed in open court. The decision followed the type of secret hearing used to discuss informant testimony or material from electronic eavesdropping. The judge recorded formal not-guilty verdicts. Johnson was still in the hospital as of March 2023.

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May 26, 1647 – Alse Young was hanged in Hartford, Connecticut, the first person executed as a witch in the American colonies. Witchcraft became punishable by death in the Connecticut Colony in 1642, and remained on the list of capital crimes in Connecticut until 1750. Thirty years later, her daughter, Alice Young Beaman, was accused of witchcraft in Springfield, Massachusetts, but her family said it was slander, and one of her sons defended her. She was never indicted.

MeetingHousebuiltinHartfordConnecticutin1635-siteofAlseYoungtrialforwitchcraft.jpg — Meeting House built in Hartford, Connecticut in 1635 – site of Alse Young’s trial for witchcraft

May 26, 1689 – Lady Mary Wortley Montagu born, English poet and letter writer; she “stole” her education from books in her father’s library, teaching herself Latin. Remembered for letters written home from the Ottoman Empire as the wife of the British ambassador to Turkey, the first notable secular work by a woman about “the Muslim Orient” (Letters from Turkey). Also notable for introducing and campaigning for smallpox inoculation in Britain after her return from Turkey, where she saw the effectiveness of an early method of inoculation, using a small amount of the virus to build the body’s immunity, drastically reducing the disease’s deadly effect. In her writings, she addresses and challenges the hindering attitudes of her society toward women and their intellectual and social growth.

May 26, 1881 – Julia C. Stimson born, American nurse, Major in the United States Army, and superintendent of the Army Nurse Corps during WWI. She was chief of the Nursing Council on National Defense during WWII, and a recipient of the Distinguished Service Medal, as well as Victory Medals for WWI and WWII. Author of Finding Themselves: The Letters of an American Army Chief Nurse in a British Hospital in France.

May 26, 1891? (her birth date is listed in other sources as 1883, and sometimes in September) – Mamie Smith born, African American vaudeville singer, dancer, pianist, and actress. In February, 1920, she became the first Black artist to make vocal blues recordings, “That Thing Called Love” and “You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down,” as “Mamie Smith and Her Jazz Hounds” for Okeh Records in New York City. Fred Hagar, musical director for Okeh Records, broke the color barrier against recording black singers, in spite of boycott threats by pressure groups in both the South and the North. In August, 1920, she recorded “Crazy Blues,” which sold 75,000 copies in its first month of release, and helped open the recording industry to black performers. All the backing musicians on these recordings were white. Smith later appeared in several films, including Jailhouse Blues, an early sound film in 1929. She died in 1946, either in September or October, reportedly penniless, and was buried in unmarked ground at Frederick Douglass Memorial Park on Staten Island. In 2014, a memorial monument was erected for Mamie Smith at the historic black cemetery.

May 26, 1895 – Dorothea Lange born as Dorothea Nutzhorn, American photographer and journalist; best known for her remarkable work for the Farm Security Administration documenting the 1930s Great Depression.

May 26, 1899 – Muriel McQueen Fergusson born, Canadian lawyer and Liberal politician; Senator (1953-1975), and first woman Speaker of the Canadian Senate (1972-1974). She campaigned for increased participation of women in politics, and successfully petitioned in 1946 for the right of all New Brunswick women to vote in municipal elections. She was also an advocate for pay equity and children’s rights, and the first woman Director of Family Allowances. In 1976, she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.

May 26, 1909 – Helen Moore Anderson born, American diplomat; President Truman appointed her as Ambassador to Denmark, the first woman to serve as chief of mission at the ambassador level (1949-1953). She learned Danish after her appointment. President Kennedy appointed her as minister to Bulgaria (1962-1964), the first woman chief of a U.S. diplomatic mission behind the Iron Curtain. President Lyndon Johnson appointed her to the UN Trusteeship Council in 1965, where she was the first woman to sit on the Security Council; in 1966, she served on the UN Committee for Decolonization.

May 26, 1913 – Emily Cecilia Duncan became the UK’s first woman magistrate; she also worked for 20 years on the West Ham Union Workhouse board of guardians, and eventually became its Chair.

May 26, 1916 – Helen Kanahele born, labor organizer in Hawaii, worked with the Women’s Auxiliary of the International Longshoreman’s and Warehousemen’s Union (1949-1951) and the United Public Workers union. She campaigned for workers’ rights, fair wages, and for women to serve on juries. She was subpoenaed before the Territorial Committee on Subversive Activities in the 1950s because of her labor organizing and opposition to the death penalty.

May 26, 1916 – Henriette Roosenburg born, journalist, Dutch resistance courier during WWII, and political prisoner; noted for her memoir The Walls Came Tumbling Down. After WWII, she became a correspondent for Time Inc, in Paris, The Hague, and New York; awarded the Bronze Lion of the Netherlands.

May 26, 1924 – Thelma Hill born, dancer, choreographer, educator, co-founder of N.Y. Negro Ballet Company (1954), and founding member of the dance troupe that became Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. After an injury, she focused on teaching dance.

May 26, 1938 – Lyudmila Petrushevskaya born, Russian novelist and playwright; her work was often censored by the Soviet government, but she published a number of well-respected works of prose after perestroika; her memoir is The Girl from the Metropol Hotel.

May 26, 1943 – Erica Terpstra born, Dutch politician of the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (WD); Undersecretary for Health, Welfare and Sport (1994-1998); member of the House of Representatives (1977-1994); was an Olympic swimmer at the 1960 and 1964 Summer Olympics.

May 26, 1948 – Stevie Nicks born, American singer-songwriter, vocalist with Fleetwood Mac (1975-1987) who also had a successful solo career. Nicks is the only woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice, as a member of Fleetwood Mac in 1998, and as a solo artist in 2019.

May 26, 1951 – Sally Ride born, American astrophysicist, first American woman astronaut in space; physics professor, member of committees to investigate the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters. She died at age 61 from cancer in 2012. Her 27-year relationship with Tam O’Shaughnessy was revealed in her obituary, making her the first known LGBTQ NASA astronaut.

May 26, 1951 – Madeleine Taylor-Quinn born, Irish Fine Gael politician; member as a Teachta Dála (lower house representative) of the Oireachtas (Parliament) for County Clare and as a Senator; first woman Teachta Dála for Clare, and first woman officer in the Fine Gael party, as Joint Honorary Secretary (1979-1982).

May 26, 1953 – Kay Hagan born, American Democratic lobbyist and politician. After serving in the North Carolina Senate (1999-2008), she ran against and defeated Republican incumbent U.S. Senator from North Carolina Elizabeth Dole in 2008, the first woman to defeat an incumbent woman in a U.S. Senate race, and served in the U.S. Senate (2009-2015). In 2016, she joined the lobbying firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, but in December 2016, Hagan was hospitalized with puzzling symptoms and diagnosed with Powassan virus, a tick-borne disease causing brain swelling. She was unconscious for 43 days, then spent 5½ months at an Atlanta rehabilitation center, and continued to undergo therapy, but was unable to walk and limited in her ability to speak. She died at age 66 in 2019.

May 26, 1964 – Caitlín R. Kiernan born in Ireland, (alternate pen name Kathleen Tierney), American author of science fiction and dark fantasy; transsexual lesbian who trained as a paleontologist; noted for Silk, and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, which won the 2012 James Tiptree Jr. Award.

May 26, 1967 – Mika Yamamoto born, Japanese award-winning photojournalist for the news agency Japan Press; though she was wearing a flak jacket, Yamamoto was shot in the neck and died in 2012 while covering the Syrian Civil War in Aleppo, Syria.

May 26, 1977 – Raina Telgemeier born, American cartoonist and graphic novelist; noted for her related graphic novels, Smile; Sisters; and Drama.

May 26, 1979 – Amanda Bauer born, American astronomer and science communicator; Head of Education and Public Outreach at the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope in Tucson, Arizona; Research Astronomer at the Australian Astronomical Observatory (2013-2016); her research concerns how galaxies form, how they create new stars, and particularly why they suddenly stop creating new stars.

May 26, 2009 – President Obama nominates federal appeals judge Sonia Sotomayor to be the first Hispanic justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.

May 26, 2019 – Los Angeles Police responded to a report of a woman with a gun in a neighborhood street in Reseda, and found her with the gun pointed at her head, threatening suicide. Officers attempted to “de-escalate the situation by verbalizing with the suspect to drop the weapon,” a police statement said, noting that the department’s Mental Evaluation Unit was contacted. But “at some point” while the officers were talking to her, an “officer involved shooting” occurred, wounding the woman while she was pointing the gun at her own head. She was taken to an area hospital, and listed in stable condition. None of the officers were injured and a handgun was recovered at the scene, police said. No statement was issued on why the suicidal woman was shot by the police. The LAPD’s Use of Force unit, the Inspector General and the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s JSID shooting team all investigated. In October, 2019, the Police Executive Research Forum proposed a new protocol and training guide for dealing with those in mental crisis, advising officers that when the person is not armed with a gun, they should not aim their guns directly at them, but move a safe distance away, and engage them in conversation instead of shouting orders. “Pointing a gun at someone and saying, ‘I’m here to save you,’ it kind of has a mixed message,” said Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore, who thinks the guidance makes sense. “We should do anything we can to minimize the use of force and maximize the saving of lives.” Authors Alejandra Jordan and Nancy R. Panza studied five years of LAPD data on such encounters. The LAPD Mental Evaluation Unit trains officers to handle mental health incidents and tracks events in which subjects either verbally declared they wished to be killed by police or acted in an aggressive manner to encourage being shot. The study found 419 such episodes in Los Angeles over five years, from 2010 to 2015. Out of 419 cases, lethal force was used seven times, killing five of the subjects. One officer was injured.

AlejandraJordanandNancyR.Panza.jpg — Alejandra Jordan and Nancy R. Panza

May 26, 2020 – In Greece, a serial rapist dubbed “the beast of Kavos,” had been convicted of sexually assaulting three British women and given a 53-year sentence in 2012. But he was given early release in 2018 under a controversial law aimed at relieving severe overcrowding in the nation’s prisons. He previously served time in prison for three earlier rapes. The terms of his release were that he had to remain on the island of Corfu, and report regularly to the police. But shortly after his early release, he abducted an Albanian woman at knifepoint, and kept her in the forest, raping her multiple times before she managed to escape. A manhunt involving over 100 police, drones, sniffer dogs, and tracking devices took over two weeks to find his hideout in the forest. He was running from the police when he plunged from a cliff, broke his back, and suffered multiple wounds. A public prosecutor formally charged him with rape after surgery was completed on his back. Because of public outcry, rape and other violent crimes are now excluded from eligibility under the early release statute. One of his victims, British Airways steward Kayleigh Morgan, was left scarred and partially sighted after being punched repeatedly in the face during a 14-hour ordeal. She had publicly campaigned against his release. She told reporters, “I warned he would strike again and was proved right. I’m just glad he was caught before yet another woman’s life was ruined.”

May 26, 2021 – For the first time since its founding in 1793, the Louvre’s Director will be a woman. French President Emmanuel Macron appointed art historian and curator Laurence Élisabeth Des Cars as head of the world’s most visited museum. Des Cars, who had been president of both the Musée d’Orsay and L’Orangerie in Paris since 2017, took over the prestigious post in September, 2021. She is an expert on the art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

May 26, 2022 – A bombshell report by the independent firm, Guidepost Solutions, detailing how the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee mishandled allegations of sex abuse, stonewalled numerous survivors, and prioritized protecting the SBC from liability has led to top Southern Baptists releasing a previously secret list of hundreds of pastors and other church-affiliated personnel accused of sexual abuse. The 205-page database has over 700 entries from cases, mostly from 2000 to 2019, including a former SBC president who allegedly assaulted another pastor’s wife in 2010. He denied the allegation, but resigned from his position on the SBC’s North American Mission Board.

SouthernBaptistConventionsExecutiveCommitteesexabusescandal.jpg

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May 27, 1792 – Julia Evelina Smith born, American suffragist, author, and translator, known for Abby Smith and her Cows, about tax resistance in the struggle for suffrage, and for her translations of the Bible from the original languages.

Julia Evelina Smith and Abby Hadassah Smith

May 27, 1812 – After an uprising in Cochabamba, Bolivia, was put down for a second time by Spanish General Goyeneche, the women of the city are gathered by Manuela Gandarilla, an old blind woman, to take up the arms of their dead and wounded in the Battle of La Coronilla, named for the hill where it was fought. They are slaughtered by the Spanish. Commemorated as Mothers’ Day but also called “Día de las heroínas de Coronillas.”

May 27, 1818 – Amelia Bloomer born, American journalist and women’s rights activist; first woman to own, operate, and edit a newspaper. The Lily was the first newspaper specifically for women. She was also an advocate for “rational dress” for women. Bloomers were named for her, but she was introduced to the fashion by Elizabeth Smith Miller.

May 27, 1819 – Julia Ward Howe born, American poet, songwriter, and woman suffrage campaigner; wrote lyrics of The Battle Hymn of the Republic; first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was posthumously inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

May 27, 1849 – Alzina Parsons Stevens born, American labor leader, reformer, and journalist; she lost her right index finger as a child working in a cotton factory; as an adult, she moved to Chicago, and worked as a typesetter, proofreader, compositor, editor, correspondent, and reporter. She joined the Knights of Labor, and organized the Working Woman’s Union, the first of its kind in Chicago in 1877, then went on to organize women laborers in Toledo, Ohio. In 1892, she came back to Chicago, and became a resident of Hull House, working with Florence Kelley advocating for an 8-hour-day for child laborers.

May 27, 1861 – Victoria Earle Matthews born, American author, essayist, journalist, settlement worker, and activist; founder of the White Rose Mission, a settlement house for young black women.

May 27, 1883 – Jessie Arms Botke born, American painter and muralist; influential figure in art in California; noted for her studies of birds.

May 27, 1907 – Rachel Carson born, American biologist, environmentalist, and author; her book Silent Spring exposed the dangers of DDT, and helped launch the environmental movement.

May 27, 1909 – Mary Peters Fieser born, organic chemist, co-wrote the textbook “Organic Chemistry” in 1944, and the series “Reagents for Organic Synthesis” (1967-1994), a constantly updated standard laboratory reference.

May 27, 1915 – Louise Gibson Annand-MacFarquhar born, Scottish painter and documentary filmmaker; she traveled extensively with her second husband, and was a member of the Scottish Ladies Climbing Club. She began displaying her art-work in 1945. Her paintings are mainly of stark and isolated landscapes, but she also painted some abstracts. Annand-MacFarquhar was a pioneer in Scottish filmmaking, producing, directing, and editing many 16mm films throughout her life, including the first-ever film biography of Scottish architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh in 1965. She was also President of the Society of Scottish Women Artists (1963-1966 and 1980-1985).

Louise Gibson Annand-MacFarquhar — ‘Wasteland’

May 27, 1916 – Jacqueline Nearne born in Brighton; British agent for the WWII Special Operations Executive in France during the Nazi occupation. Her father was English, and her mother was Spanish. When she was 18, she went to work as a travelling representative for an office equipment company, based in Nice, France. When France fell in 1940 to the Germans, she made her way through Portugal and Gibraltar back to England. Nearne applied to the Auxillary Territorial Service (the women’s branch of the British Army), but was turned down because she had no experience driving in the dark, or on the left-hand side of the road. In 1942, she joined the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, an independent all-woman registered charity involved with nursing and intelligence work. Her fluency in French caused her to quickly be recruited by F Section, a branch of the SOE. She was trained as a courier, and in Morse code and wireless radio operation. Nearne and Odette Sansom were the first women sent to Training School 51 Ringway Parachute School. In January, 1943, Nearne parachuted into France to work for the vast ‘Stationer’ circuit in central France, one of the espionage networks which encouraged and aided the French resistance, and gathered intelligence which was forwarded to SOE headquarters in London. Despite the high risk of being exposed or betrayed, she travelled as a courier by train, maintaining contact with other networks, and carrying spare parts for radios in a cosmetics bag. After 15 months in the field, she returned to Britain in April, 1944. After the war, she moved to New York City and worked in the Protocol Department of the United Nations. She died of cancer at age 66 in 1982.

May 27, 1928 – Thea Musgrave born, Scottish composer of opera and orchestral music.

May 27, 1931 – Faten Hamama born, Egyptian film and television actress and producer, a child actor who became an icon of Middle Eastern cinema; she fled the country in 1966 after being harassed by Egyptian Intelligence for her liberal views, but returned in 1971 after President Gamal Nasser’s death; in her films and television programs, she often criticized Egyptian laws that restricted women; her film Oridu Hallan (أريد حلاً, I Want a Solution) portrayed the hardships of an Egyptian woman unable to get a divorce from her husband because at the time, only men could file for divorce. After the success of the film, the Egyptian government changed the law to allow a woman to divorce her husband, if she returned the mahr (dowry) he had given her.

May 27, 1944 – Ingrid Roscoe born, English historian and politician, writer on English art and Lord Lieutenant of West Yorkshire.

May 27, 1950 – Dee Dee Bridgewater born, American Jazz singer-songwriter; United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for the Food and Agriculture Organization, appealing for funding of grassroots projects to end hunger.

May 27, 1956 – Cynthia McFadden born, American television journalist; senior legal and investigative correspondent for NBC News since 2014; anchor and correspondent for ABC News, and co-anchor of Nightime (1994-2014); recipient of the 1995 George Foster Peabody Award.

May 27, 1956 – Dame Rosemary Squire born, British theatre owner and producer; co-founder and joint chief executive of Trafalgar Entertainment Group Ltd, and of The Ambassador Theatre Group, which has venues in Britain, the U.S., and Australia, one of the most prolific theatre producers in the world.

May 27, 1968 – Rebekah Brooks born, British journalist and newspaper editor; CEO of News UK since 2015; CEO of News International (2009-2001); first woman editor of The Sun (2003-2009); editor of News of the World (2000-2003), where she was cleared of all charges after the newspaper was one of several Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation papers whose employees were charged with phone hacking and police bribery.

May 27, 1971 – Sophie Walker born, journalist and leader of the UK’s Women’s Equality Party since 2015; the WEP’s candidate in the 2016 London mayoral election; author of Grace Under Pressure, about her daughter who has Asperger’s syndrome, and an advocate for the National Autistic Society.

May 27, 1975 – Feryal Özel born in Turkey; American astrophysicist specializing in the physics of compact objects and high energy astrophysical phenomena; widely recognized for her contributions to the field of neutron stars, black holes, and magnetars: currently a professor in the University of Arizona’s Astronomy Department and the Steward Observatory. Recipient of a Hubble Postdoctoral Fellowship (2002-2005) and the 2013 Maria Goeppert Mayer award from the American Physical Society.

May 27, 1997 – The U.S. Supreme Court rules the sexual harassment suit filed by Paula Jones against Bill Clinton could continue while he was serving as U.S. president, establishing that a sitting president is not exempt from civil litigation for acts committed outside of public office. In November, 1998, Clinton made a payment of $850,000 to settle the suit.

May 27, 2019 – In the midst of the extensive coverage of Republican-dominated legislatures passing bills with the clear intent of ending women’s right to choose abortion, there are also quieter but equally critical battles going on in some states where the majority of lawmakers are Democrats. In Rhode Island, a bill to repeal older state abortion laws deemed unconstitutional by the courts, and replace them with statutes that say the state will not restrict the right to an abortion prior to fetal viability or afterward if an abortion is necessary for the health or life of the mother stalled in a key committee. Though Rhode Island is controlled by Democrats at all levels of government, it is also a heavily Catholic state. Jocelyn Foye, co-director of The Womxn Project in Rhode Island, said she thinks that while many politicians run as Democrats in the state to win, they don’t always vote like Democrats, particularly on abortion rights. She said she is frustrated that the abortion-protection bill has not progressed. “The only thing standing in the way of this bill is Democrats, and they need to know that,” said Liz Gledhill, a member of the Rhode Island Democratic Party Women’s Caucus. “You can’t call yourself a Democrat and vote against a bill like this.” A similar situation doomed abortion-rights legislation in New Mexico earlier in 2019, but in 2023, New Mexico enacted a law to ensure access to reproductive healthcare, including abortion, and gender affirming care. A 2019 bill in Hawaii to allow advanced-practice registered nurses to perform abortions stalled in the Hawaiian House health committee, which insisted on further discussion, and formed a task force to study the issue. The Hawaii bill finally passed and was signed into law in April 2021.

Liz Gledhill, R.I. Democratic Party Women’s Caucus — Jocelyn Foye of **The Womxn Project**

May 27, 2020 – In line with a recent UN study warning that the Covid-19 pandemic threatens to reverse decades of progress made by women toward equality in the workplace, career women in France are speaking out anonymously in an interview published in The Atlantic. They have several problems in common with many other women worldwide because of the national lockdown. An executive at a major French cosmetics company was running a team of 70 and overseeing her kids’ schooling while her husband, a nurse, worked long hours treating coronavirus patients in a Paris hospital. An executive at an energy company continued to work full time, but says she is also doing all the cooking and cleaning, and making sure her kids take their online classes—because her husband doesn’t pull his weight. The chief executive of a French lifestyle website and her partner managed to take care of their young daughters only because she isn’t working full-time and has put her employees on France’s part-time-unemployment scheme. They all hope that the government and the country’s employers will ensure that they and other women don’t burn out or leave the labor market. France is an important bellwether because of its extensive state child care and mandatory early-childhood education, which are even more extensive than Germany or Italy, which helped keep female-employment levels high. Garance Wattez-Ricard, head of AXA Emerging Customers, says French women are a “walking paradox,” because many women with very successful careers also have several children, slim figures, and “perfect nails” – “But at the same time what we’re still hiding is a form of inequality, because it’s not true that ultimately we’ve reached our objective … We’ve earned the freedom to have children and a successful career, but it’s still us doing a lot of the housework and cooking and cleaning.” Businesses are starting to reopen nationwide, but many schools are not. Since women are still the default caregivers for young children and aging parents, a far higher number of women may stay at home, while men go back to work.

May 27, 2021 – New York City has over 100 mayors, but not one of them was a woman. Three women were on the ballot for the Democratic primary in June, 2021. Candidate Kathryn Garcia said people keep asking “Can a woman win? Every time you have the conversation of viability and not ability, it makes it so people think, ‘Oh, she can’t possibly win.’ Shouldn’t we actually be asking ourselves who’s going to be a good mayor?” Candidates Dianne Morales and Maya Wiley also acknowledged that women are forced to run a second race – trying to convince donors and electors that they are capable of winning, in spite of ample research showing that it is not true that women are less electable. In a ranked-choice mayoral election, Kathryn Garcia got 19.6% of the vote, and Maya Wiley 21.4% in the first round of counting. In later rounds, Morales and then Wiley were eliminated, and in the eighth and final round, Garcia, with 49.6% of the vote, narrowly lost to Eric Adams, who garnered 50.4% of the vote and became the city’s second Black mayor. Kathryn Garcia became Director of New York State Operations in September 2021, and Maya Wiley became President and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights in 2022.

NYMayoralRace-KathrynGarcia-DianneMorales-MayaWiley.jpg — Kathryn Garcia — Dianne Morales — Maya Wiley

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May 28, 1831 – Eliza Ann Gardner born to James Gardner, a successful ship contractor, and his wife Eliza. Their home in Boston was a center of the black abolitionist movement, and a stop on the Underground Railroad. Eliza received a better education than most of her contemporaries, but not a college education, so she was trained in dressmaking, and later kept a boarding house. She was a prominent African-American abolitionist, who knew and worked with Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. Gardner was an advocate for women’s equality, and a leader in Boston’s African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. She helped persuade the AME Zion church elders that women should be ordained as ministers. She founded the Zion Missionary Society, and was also a founder of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs. She died at age 90 in 1922.

May 28, 1858 – Lizzie Black Kander born, American social reformer; working as a truant officer, she was appalled at the living conditions of immigrants, and joined the Milwaukee chapter of the National Council of Jewish Women, which provided classes in sewing, cooking, and English to Russian immigrants. Kander founded the Milwaukee Jewish Settlement House, and taught cooking and nutrition classes there. She compiled The Settlement Cookbook, which was so successful that its sales funded the settlement house, and its expansion into larger facilities.

May 28, 1888 – Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot born, English writer and book reviewer under various pseudonyms for the literary magazine The Criterion. Her disastrous marriage to T.S. Eliot, lasting from 1915 to 1933, when he formally separated from her, has been the subject of much speculation. Her health problems began in early childhood with tuberculosis of the bone in her left arm which several operations failed to eliminate. As a teenager, she had heavy, irregular menstruation, to her great embarrassment, and severe pre-menstrual tension, which led to mood swings, fainting spells, and migraines. A doctor prescribed potassium bromide, used as a sedative and anticonvulsant, which was widely banned decades later because of its chronic toxicity. It was often given to women who were diagnosed as “hysterics.” Her mother believed she was suffering from “moral insanity” defined as “madness consisting in a morbid perversion of the natural feelings, affections, inclinations, temper, habits, moral dispositions, and natural impulses, without any remarkable disorder or defect of the interest or knowing and reasoning faculties, and particularly without any insane illusion or hallucinations.” In 1938, after police found her confused and wandering the streets, her brother had her committed to a mental hospital. She died there at age 58 in 1947, either from a heart attack or possibly a deliberate overdose.

May 28, 1912 – Ruby Payne-Scott born, Australian physicist and astronomer, the first woman radio astronomer; noted for her work at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation on solar bursts; she discovered Type I and Type III bursts, and contributed to work on Type II and IV bursts, as well as the development of the first radio astronomical interferometer observation.

May 28, 1913 – May Swenson born, American poet, translator and playwright, poet-in-residence for several universities, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, recipient of numerous awards and honors.

May 28, 1922 – Lucille Kallen born, television comedy writer and novelist. She wrote humorous skits with Mel Tolkin for Imogene Coca and Sid Caesar (1950-1954), also wrote for Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, and Dick Van Dyke; she began writing mystery novels in her late 70s.

May 28, 1923 – U.S. Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty declares that it is legal for women to wear pants and that they could not be banned from doing so.

The prohibition of trousers for women was enforced in most European countries and many U.S. states not only by social custom, but by laws that punished transgressors. A number of U.S. states continued to pass and enforce laws against “cross dressing” in spite of the Attorney General’s announcement. Women senators were banned from wearing trousers on the floor of the U.S. senate until 1993. While the dress code for the Senate was never officially codified, the norms were enforced by Senate doorkeepers, who controlled access to the chamber and served partly as security guards, partly as protocol monitors. Newly elected Senator Carol Moseley-Braun, one of four new women senators, was unaware of the ban, and wore a pantsuit on her first day. There were audible gasps. Pantsuits began being allowed at federal agencies around 1970, including the State Department and the Pentagon – but were forbidden to women clerks at the FBI until after J. Edgar Hoover died in 1972. Senator Barbara Mikulski, another one of the four new women senators, was aware of the ban, but decided to challenge the outdated norm. During the cold winter weather early in 1993, she approached fellow Democrat Robert Byrd, then the President pro tempore of the Senate, to advise him of her plans to wear pants. Byrd had the Senate parliamentarian, Alan Frumin, check the rules to make sure pants on women weren’t explicitly outlawed. When he determined that they weren’t, Byrd “gave the nod,” Mikulski remembered. “He didn’t say yes, but he gave a nod.” Mikulski walked onto the Senate floor in a pair of slacks, and from the reaction, she recalled, “You would have thought that I was walking on the moon.” These pants-wearing senators set a precedent—one that would soon become permanent. The Senate sergeant-at-arms that year was Martha Pope, the first-ever woman to hold the job (she was elected two years prior). According to the Chicago Sun-Times, her doorkeepers followed a written policy manual that stated, “Women are required to wear business attire, i.e., dress, skirt and blouse or business suit.” After Moseley-Braun and Mikulski wore pantsuits on the floor, Pope circulated a memo to her staff, amending the manual to read, “Women are required to wear business attire, i.e. dress, skirt/blouse, business suit, coordinated pantsuit (slacks and matching blazer; no stirrup pants).” According to Moseley-Braun, “What happened next was that other people started wearing pants. All the women staffers went to their bosses and said, ‘If this senator can wear pants, then why can’t I?’ And so it was the pantsuit revolution.”

Carol Moseley-Braun — Barbara Mikulski — Martha Pope

May 28, 1933 – Zelda Rubinstein born, American actress, activist for human rights, little people, and AIDS awareness; known for playing Ginny on TV’s Picket Fences, and the medium Tangina Barrons in Poltergeist. She made a series of advertisements promoting AIDS awareness and safer sex, beginning in 1984, and was part of the first AIDS Project Los Angeles AIDS Walk in 1985. She died at age 76 in 2010.

May 28, 1936 – Betty Shabazz born, American nurse and civil rights activist; she took college classes in her thirties to earn a Ph.D.; Shabazz was Director of Institutional Advancement and Public Affairs at Medgar Evers College (1980-1997); widow of Malcolm X.

May 28, 1943 – Helen Hardin aka Tsa-sah-wee-eh (“Little Standing Spruce”) born, contemporary painter who incorporated symbols and motifs from her Santa Clara Pueblo heritage in her work. Featured in the 1976 PBS American Indian artists series.

May 28, 1944 – Gladys Knight born, American Motown singer-songwriter, leader of Gladys Knight and the Pips; winner of four Grammy Awards, and dubbed the ‘Empress of Soul.’ Gladys Knight and the Pips were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996. In 2017, Knight helped raise $400,000 for the Children’s Learning Centers of Fairfield County at an event co-hosted by Carol Anne Riddell and Alan Kalter.

May 28, 1946 – Dame Janet Paraskeva born, British government official; chair of the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission (2007-2012); Civil Service commissioner (2006-2007); previously served as a magistrate and member of the Youth Justice Board.

May 28, 1947 – Lynn Johnston born, Canadian cartoonist, known for her comic strip For Better or For Worse; first woman and first Canadian to win the National Cartoonist’s Society’s Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year in 1985.

May 28, 1947 – Anne M. Leggett born, American mathematical logician, former instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Texas at Austin, and the Loyola Chicago faculty. Leggett is the editor-in-chief of the newsletter of the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM), and co-editor with Bettye Anne Case of Complexities: Women in Mathematics (2005).

May 28, 1952 – The women of Greece win the right to vote.

May 28, 1955 – Laura Amy Schlitz born, American children’s and young adult author and librarian; her books are often set in historical times, including Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village, 2008 Newbery Medal winner, and The Hired Girl, winner of the 2015 Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction; she also writes fantasy, like The Night Fairy.

May 28, 1965 – Mary Coughlan born, Irish politician; served as Teachta Dála (1987-2011), which is a member of Dáil Éireann, the lower house of the Oireachtas (Irish Parliament); where she served on a number of committees, and was appointed several different cabinet positions; she served as Tánaiste (the second most-senior officer in the Irish government) from 2009 to 2010.

May 28, 1975 – Maura Johnston born, American music critic and writer; editor of Gawker Media’s Idolator (2006-2009); Music editor of The Village Voice (2011-2012); co-founder of Maura Magazine (2013-2015); Boston College’s 2013 inaugural Liberal Arts Journalism Fellow.

May 28, 2011 – Malta voted 53% in favor of a referendum to allow divorces; but the law to allow divorce requires strict conditions be met first: the parties must have been separated for at least four years; the children and the primary caregiving spouse are receiving adequate maintenance, if this is due; and there is no prospect of reconciliation.

May 28, 2014 – Menstrual Hygiene Day is created by NGO WASH United, a German-based group, with support from over 270 global partners, as part of a campaign to end the isolation and shaming of women and girls as “unclean” during their monthly menses.

May 28, 2019 – Box v. Planned Parenthood: The U.S. Supreme Court left in place a decision blocking a provision of an Indiana law that would allow the state ban abortions that are motivated by race, sex, or disability. The Court did say the state could implement a part of the law requiring abortion clinics to bury or cremate fetal remains. The decision signaled support by the conservative majority for some state efforts to tighten abortion regulations, but hesitation on re-examining key abortion rights precedents. Conservative Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the court would “soon need to confront” the issue. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said she would have overturned the entire Indiana law, because the cost and trauma of the state’s rules “may well constitute an undue burden” on a woman’s rights.

May 28, 2019 – Netflix became the first major Hollywood media company to say it would “rethink” its investment in Georgia if the state’s restrictive abortion law took effect. “We have many women working on productions in Georgia, whose rights, along with millions of others, will be severely restricted by this law,” said Ted Sarandos, Netflix chief content officer. “It’s why we will work with the ACLU and others to fight it in court.” Netflix produces the hit TV series Stranger Things and Ozark as well as other content in the state. Several actors, including Alyssa Milano, have called for a boycott. Warner Brothers, Disney, and other major studios have declined to comment to avoid alienating audiences. Georgia’s booming film and TV industry has generated 92,000 jobs and $2.7 billion in annual revenues.

May 28, 2020 – As in most other countries, the gender divide in the U.S. is widening during the global Covid-19 pandemic. In New York City, even though men are dying at almost twice the rate of women, it is women whose stress load were more impacted. Most frontline health workers are women, including 9 out of 10 nurses. In the tidal wave of U.S. unemployment, 55% of the newly unemployed were women in April, 2020. Women are heads of household in 80% of single-parent families, and with schools closed, women are taking on the lion’s share of home schooling. Rebecca Solnit, author of Men Explain Things to Me, which gave rise to the phrase “mansplaining,” summed up the pandemic’s impact on American women, “Everything wrong with life at home got a lot wronger.” She continued, “Whether it’s the rise of domestic violence and the withering away of escapes from it, the way that the sudden requirement of parents across the U.S. to become homeschoolers fell primarily on women, and that heterosexual men living with women are still far from shouldering their fair share of domestic labor.” Poor women face even harsher problems. Women make up almost two-thirds of minimum-wage workers, and many have been branded “essential workers” who must continue to work for employers that don’t supply enough masks or hand sanitizers to minimize their exposure to the virus, and don’t provide health insurance, even as these same companies post record profits. Rebecca Solnit pointed out that while most face masks being sewn voluntarily are made by women, men are far more likely to refuse to wear protective gear because it might be construed as “weakness.” It doesn’t help that Donald Trump has set an example of reckless machismo by making his public appearances maskless. As remedies for men behaving badly, Solnit suggested, “Divorce may be one treatment in some cases,” adding “Feminism liberally applied across all parties [is] the only known cure.”

May 28, 2021 – After UN Women Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka returned from an official visit to Mozambique, she spoke about her discussions with civil society leaders and the challenges they face in promoting the implementation of Women, Peace and Security agenda, “I want to congratulate you for the many laws that have passed which advanced women’s rights in Mozambique.” Quiteria Guiringane, a social activist from the Network of Young Women Leaders, said: “… thanks to the sacrifice of activists throughout the country, the pandemic forced us to reinvent ourselves. Relying on technologies we made use of the webinars for women to connect. Making use of the photo-voices we showcased challenges of women and girls from all over the country.” Director Mlambo-Ngcuka commended the efforts of Mozambican women leaders who advocate for much-needed laws and representation of women in public institutions and urged them to continue their work. “I … congratulate you for the representation of women in public institutions in Mozambique. Don’t let it slip back. If you pushed it in the public sector, it is easy to push in the private sector,” she said. “Mozambique has strong women who have been present with us, for us, all this time. I think this time again you will be able to rise. We need to make sure that we don’t lose the progress we achieved. We want to make sure that we continue to pass laws around issues that you are working on and that WPS issues in a Compact is taken forward,” the Executive Director concluded.

Quiteria Guiringane and Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka

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May 29, 1568 – Virginia de’ Medici born; in 1586, she became by marriage Duchess of Modena and Reggio. Though she did not want to marry Cesare d’Este, and his infidelities greatly upset her, they nevertheless had ten children, six sons and four daughters, all of whom survived past childhood. She served as regent of the Duchy during her husband’s absences, including during a war over possession of the Garfagnana region. Virginia successfully protected the autonomy of the city of Modena from the attacks of the local Podestà (chief magistrate), but started showing symptoms of mental illness in 1596. She continued to cope with her duties as regent, and in January 1601 while her husband was in Reggio, and while she was heavily pregnant, she stopped attempts by the Podestà and the Judge of Modena to overthrow her authority. However, as time when on, she was subject to fits of rage, worsened by the Duke’s continuing unfaithfulness. An attempted exorcism of “the devil who possessed her” drove her completely over the edge in 1608. She did die peacefully after blessing all her children in 1615 at age 46. There were the usual rumors that her husband had poisoned her.

May 29, 1851 – Inspired by the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments formulated and approved at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, a Women’s Rights Convention was held in Akron Ohio, led by Frances Dana Gage. In spite of a number of male hecklers, including several ministers, the speakers persisted, including Sojourner Truth, who delivered her powerful “Ain’t I a Woman?” oration.

May 29, 1852 – Famed soprano Jenny Lind, billed as the Swedish Nightingale, completes a very successful two-year American tour, then donates her considerable profits to charity.

May 29, 1861 – Dorothea Dix offers her help in setting up hospitals for the Union Army. She serves as Superintendent of Army Nurses (1861-1865) implementing the federal army nursing program in which over 3,000 nurses served, in spite of heavy opposition by many army doctors and surgeons to women nurses. Union and Confederate wounded alike were treated and nursed.

May 29, 1876 – Helen Woodard Atwater born, author and editor, first full-time editor of the Journal of Home Economics.

May 29, 1882 – Doris Ulmann born, American photographer, known for her long-term documentation of the rural South, particularly her portraits of the people of Appalachia and the Gullah people (1928-1934). Her book, Roll Jordan Roll, collected 90 of her photographs of the former slaves and their descendants in the Gullah coastal region of South Carolina. It was published in 1933. Ulmann was a member of the Pictorial Photographers of America.

May 29, 1892 – Alfonsina Storni born in Switzerland, Argentinean poet, journalist, and feminist; important Argentine and Latin-American modernist poet; health issues, depression and economic hardship led her to commit suicide by drowning in the sea at age 46.

May 29, 1894 – Beatrice Lillie born in Canada, British comedic performer, singer, and satirical song and sketch writer; inveterate entertainer of WWII troops – when before a performance she learned that her only son had been killed in action, she refused to cancel or postpone her appearance. She won a Tony Award in 1953 for her revue, An Evening With Beatrice Lillie.

May 29, 1912 – Curtis Publishing fires 15 young women for dancing the “Turkey Trot” during their lunch break.

May 29, 1935 – Sylvia Robinson born, American singer, record producer and co-founder/CEO of Sugar Hill Records, and founder of Bon Ami Records; dubbed the “Mother of Hip-Hop.”

May 29, 1943 – “Rosie the Riveter” by Norman Rockwell appears on the Saturday Evening Post cover.

May 29, 1945 – Joyce Tenneson born, American fine arts photographer; noted for her nude studies, and primarily using a large-format (20 X 24) Polaroid camera; recipient of the 1990 “Photographer of the Year” Award from Women in Photography International.

May 29, 1961 – Melissa Etheridge born, American singer-songwriter, gay rights advocate, and environmental activist; came out publicly as a lesbian in 1993, at the Triangle Ball, a gay celebration of President Bill Clinton’s first inauguration, and has been an LGBTQ rights advocate since. Toured the U.S. and Canada in 2006, campaigning for renewable fuel. Etheridge is a breast cancer survivor and appeared on Dateline NBC in 2005, during Breast Cancer Awareness Month, to talk about the disease.

May 29, 1966 – Natalie Nougayrède born, French journalist and editor for Le Monde, known for asking French officials tough questions while working as a reporter (2005-2012). In 2005, she was honored with the Albert Londres Prize for her coverage of the Second Chechen War. In 2013, she became the first woman executive and managing editor of Le Monde, but she resigned in 2014 because of disputes over proposed changes. She became a writer and foreign affairs commentator for the British paper The Guardian. Nougayrède is also a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a pan-European think tank which conducts independent research on European foreign and security policy, and promotes informed debate about Europe’s role in the world.

May 29, 1968 – Jessica Morden born, British Labour Party Member of Parliament for Newport East since 2005, the first woman MP in South Wales; on the board of The Young People’s Trust for the Environment.

May 29, 1968 – Hida Viloria born in New York to Columbian and Venezuelan parents; American writer and intersex/non-binary rights activist; author of Born Both: An Intersex Life; outspoken opponent of medically unnecessary cosmetic surgeries and hormone therapies on intersex infants and minors. In 2011, she founded the Intersex Campaign for Equality, and serves as its director.

May 29, 1970 – Natarsha Belling born, Australian journalist and news presenter since 2015 for Network 10 on Ten Weekend News; since 2019, she has also appeared on Studio 10, the network’s daily morning news and talk show.

May 29, 1974 – Jenny Willott born, British Liberal Democrat, Member of Parliament for Cardiff Central (2005-2015), the first woman elected to the seat; Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Employment Relations, Consumer and Postal Affairs and Women and Equalities (2013-2014).

May 29, 1977 – Janet Guthrie becomes the first woman to qualify for and complete in Indy 500 auto race.

May 29, 1982 – Nataliya Dobrynska born, Ukrainian heptathlete who won gold at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and a gold medal in the Pentathlon at the World Indoor Championships in 2012, the first woman to score over 5000 for the indoor pentathlon. Her score of 5013 broke a world record which stood for 20 years.

May 29, 2019 – The Louisiana state legislature passed a so-called “heartbeat” abortion ban, which Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards said he supported. Under the measure, abortions would be illegal after an ultrasound picks up the electric pulsing of what will become a fetus’ heart; this can happen as early as six weeks into a pregnancy. There were no exceptions for cases of rape and incest, but it did allow abortions to prevent a woman’s death or if the pregnancy presents “a serious risk of the substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.” It also allowed an abortion if the pregnancy is “medically futile.” Doctors found guilty of performing abortions illegally would face up to two years in prison. Edwards, a Roman Catholic known for his anti-abortion beliefs, signed the bill into law. Anti-abortion activists hoped that newly-enacted restrictions in Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, and other states would lead the Supreme Court to reconsider Roe v. Wade. In May, 2021, the Supreme Court announced it would consider the constitutionality of a similar law passed by Mississippi in 2018, which had been struck down by a lower court ruling. Jennifer Dalven, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Reproductive Freedom Project, said the case “could decimate, if not take away entirely, the constitutional right to abortion. If the Supreme Court rules in favor of Mississippi, it will take the decision about whether to have an abortion away from individuals and hand it over to politicians. The American people overwhelmingly support the right of individuals to make this decision for themselves and will not tolerate having this right taken away.”

**Jennifer Dalven — ACLU — Louisiana state capitol**

May 29, 2020 – Despite widespread opposition, a new law passed in China requiring couples seeking a divorce to first complete a month-long “cooling-off” period. Couples filing for separation have to wait 30 days before their request will be processed. One internet user posted, “We cannot even divorce freely? There must still be a lot of people who marry impulsively; they should set a cooling off period for getting married as well!” The cooling-off period only applies in cases where both parties are seeking the divorce. It will not apply if one spouse is seeking divorce following domestic violence, but opponents questioned how judges would determine cases of domestic violence, and whether the cooling-off period would leave some partners more vulnerable. The country’s first-ever civil code went into effect on January 1, 2021 – sweeping legislation that replaced existing laws on marriage, adoption, and property rights. China’s divorce rate has climbed steadily since 2003, when marriage laws were liberalized. Women are also becoming more financially independent, leading to what a Chinese official termed “reckless divorces” not conducive to family stability. In 2019, 4.15 million Chinese couples divorced, compared to 1.3 million divorces in 2003. Since the law went into effect in 2021, divorces in China dropped by 70%, but the number of marriages steadily declined – in 2019 the number was down by 33% from 2014 – and some cases of domestic violence during the “cooling off” period raised fears that the law doesn’t protect women enough.

May 29, 2021 – Shawn Thierry, member of the Texas House of Representatives since 2017, was “… shocked that black mothers like myself are three times more likely to die than our white counterparts,” said Thierry. “And no one in the legislature was really talking about it.” In 2012, Thierry nearly lost her own life during an emergency C-section 2012 when an epidural was given too high up in her spine, causing temporary paralysis. “I was an attorney who had full private healthcare coverage and I almost died. I cannot imagine what the outcome would be for the thousands of other African American women without health insurance.” The U.S. has the highest maternal death rate among comparably developed nations, and is the only industrialized nation where such deaths are rising. According to data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the maternal mortality rate in Texas is even worse than the national average, at 18.5 deaths per 100,000 live births. Black women in Texas account for only 11% of live births, yet account for 31% of maternal deaths. A recent study concluded that nearly 90% of those deaths were preventable. Thierry has repeatedly filed legislation to combat the glaring problem. Her proposals included racial bias training for medical professionals and a bill to fix a “severe” maternal health data backlog by creating a centralized registry. Her bills did not advance in 2019 or in 2020. Focused on restricting abortion rights, the male- and Republican-dominated state legislature has dragged its feet on maternal mortality. In 2021, lawmakers did put through one of her bills, co-sponsored by Representative Toni Rose, which extends Medicaid care to a year after birth, but it stops short of providing the full Medicaid expansion. Governor Greg Abbott signed the bill into law, and it went into effect in September, 2021.

**Shawn Thierry with faces of real moms**

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May 30, 1431 – In Rouen, France, 19-year-old Jeanne d’Arc (Joan of Arc) is burned at the stake as a heretic by an English-dominated tribunal. One of the charges against her was that she refused to give up wearing her soldier’s clothing after her arrest — she complained that her guards tried to rape her, but the Inquisitors continued to insist she should wear female garb. Later, the Inquisitor-General reversed all charges on appeal (1456), exonerating her – 25 years after her death.

May 30, 1686 – Antonina Houbraken born, Dutch artist, portraitist and illustrator known for topographical drawings; many of her drawings were attributed to her husband until the recent discovery that drawings signed J.S. were actually hers, and drawings signed J:St were her husband’s work; her work is now regarded as more precise and detailed than his, and often includes human figures.

‘Fantasy Landscape’ — by Antonina Houbraken

May 30, 1847 – Alice Stopford Green born, Irish historian and nationalist, supported the pro-Treaty side in the Irish Civil War and was among the first nominees to the newly formed Seanad Éireann in 1922, where she served as an independent member until her death in 1929; noted for The Making of Ireland and its Undoing, published in 1908, and A History of the Irish State to 1014, published in 1925.

May 30, 1869 – Grace Andrews born, American mathematician; PhD from Columbia in 1899; Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Barnard College (1900-1902); she and Charlotte Angas Scott are the only women listed in the first edition of American Men of Science, initially published in 1906.

May 30, 1874 – Josephine Preston Peabody born, American poet and playwright; won the Stratford-on-Avon prize for her drama The Piper.

May 30, 1899 – Pearl Hart, dressed in men’s clothing, robbed a stage coach 30 miles southeast of mining town Globe, Arizona, with her partner Joe Boot, one of the last stage coach robberies in the U.S. Hart and Boot escaped on horseback, but were captured after a long manhunt in the remote high desert. Hart talked tough, smoked cigarettes, drank liquor, used morphine, had an active sex life, and could shoot straight with a heavy Colt revolver, but she was a small woman who could also knit and write poetry. Public interest was so intense, Cosmopolitan, the most popular women’s magazine of the day, sent two correspondents to get an in-depth interview. Hart obliged, and created her own legend. Biographers have been trying to unravel truth from fiction ever since.

May 30, 1901 – Cornelia Otis Skinner born, author, actress and playwright; best known for Our Hearts Were Young and Gay.

May 30, 1907 – Germaine Tillion born, French anthropologist and ethnologist. She did field work for her doctorate (1934-1940) studying the Berber and Chaoui people in the Aures region of northeastern Algeria. When she returned to Paris in 1940, France had been invaded by Germany. As her first act of resistance, she helped a Jewish family by giving them her family’s papers. She a member of the French Resistance in the network of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. Her missions included helping prisoners escape and organizing intelligence for the allied forces from 1940 to 1942. Tillion was betrayed by a collaborator who infiltrated her group, and was arrested August 13, 1942. In October 1943, she was sent to the German concentration camp of Ravensbrück, near Berlin with her mother, Émilie Tillion, also a resistante. She undertook a precise ethnographic analysis of the concentration camp. Her mother was killed in March 1945. Tillion got out of Ravensbrück in the spring of that year in a rescue operation of the Swedish Red Cross that had been negotiated by Folke Bernadotte. In 1973, she published Ravensbruck: An eyewitness account of a women’s concentration camp. Tillion returned to Algeria in 1954 at the brink of the Algerian War of Independence. She said the principal cause of the conflict was the pauperization of the Algerian population. Tillion launched ‘Social Centers’ in October 1955, intended to make available higher education as well as vocational training to the rural population, allowing them to survive in the cities. In 1957 during the Battle of Algiers, she secretly met with National Liberation Front leader Yacef Saadi, at his instigation, trying to end the spiral of executions and indiscriminate attacks. Tillion was among the first to denounce the use of torture by French forces in the war. She remained outspoken against the impoverishment of the Algerian population, and French use of torture, and in favor of emancipation of women in the Mediterranean. In 2004, along with several other French intellectuals, she issued a statement against torture in Iraq. She died in 2008 at the age of 100.

May 30 or 31, 1910 – Maria Teresa Babin born, Puerto Rican writer, poet, literary critic, and educator, taught in U.S. schools and universities as well as in Puerto Rico.

May 30, 1912 – Millicent Selsam born, American science teacher and children’s science book author; noted for Egg to Chick, her First Look series, and Biography of an Atom, which won the 1965 Thomas Alva Edison Award for best children’s science book.

May 30, 1918 – Pita Amor born as Guadalupe Amor Schmidtlein; Mexican poet; called the “11^th Muse” during her youth because she modeled for painters and photographers like Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and Raúl Anguiano, which scandalized her upper-class family. Her poetry is notable for its direct expression about metaphysical quandaries in first person voice; Yo soy mi casa, Poesía, and El Zoológico de Pita Amor.

Pita Amor with Diego Rivera and his portrait of her

May 30, 1927 – Joan L. Birman born, American mathematician, specialist in braid theory and knot theory; her book Braids, Links, and Mapping Class Groups, became the standard introductory text; on the Barnard faculty since 1973, now as Research Professor Emerita; awarded the 1996 Chauvenet Prize, given for the outstanding expository article on a mathematical topic.

May 30, 1928 – Agnès Varda born, Belgian director, producer, screenwriter and academic, known for work on feminist issues and social commentary; in 2017, she was the first woman to receive an honorary Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement; noted for Sans toit ni loi (Without roof or law – released as Vagabond in English-speaking countries).

May 30, 1938 – Billie Letts born as Billie Dean Gipson, American novelist and university professor; Where the Heart Is, Shoot the Moon, Made in the U.S.A.

May 30, 1942 – Carole Stone born, British author, radio-television broadcaster, and producer of Radio 4’s Any Questions?; author of Networking: The Art of Making Friends and The Ultimate Guide to Successful Networking. Founder of the Carole Stone Foundation in 2018 to encourage people connecting, exchanging ideas, and building friendships with people in other countries; she is a Patron of The Centre for Peaceful Solutions, and The Global Foundation to Eliminate Domestic Violence.

May 30, 1946 – Candy Lightner born, political activist, founder of MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving).

May 30, 1955 – Jacqueline McGlade born in Britain; Canadian marine biologist and environmental informatics (applied science/computing) professor, whose research focuses on spatial and nonlinear dynamics of ecosystems, climate change, and scenario development. Chief Scientist and Director of the Science Division of the UN Environment Programme based in Nairobi (2014-2017); Executive Director of the European Environmental Agency (2003-2013); Professor at University College London Institute for Global Prosperity and Faculty of Engineering, and the Sekenani Research Centre of the Maasai Mara University, Kenya; recipient of the 2013 Global Citizen Award, and the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation’s 1980 Award in Genetics.

May 30, 1955 – Dame Caroline Swift born, the Honorable Mrs. Justice Swift, noted as British leading counsel in the Shipman Inquiry (2001-2002), concerning Dr. Harold Shipman, horrific serial killer of at least 218 patients under his care, mostly elderly women; appointed as a Justice of the High Court, Queen’s Bench Division (2005-2015); chair of the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service since 2017.

May 30, 1963 – Helen Sharman born, British chemist and author, chosen out of almost 13,000 applicants to be Britain’s first astronaut for Project Juno; the first woman to visit the Mir space station in 1991; presenter of science programmes for BBC radio and television; Operations Manager for the Department of Chemistry at Imperial College London since 2015.

May 30, 1963 – Élise Lucet born, French investigative journalist, and host of Envoyé special (Special Correspondent) on France 2 television since 2016. In 2008, she became a Knight of the Légion d’honneur.

May 30, 1965 – Vivian Malone became the first black graduate from University of Alabama.

May 30, 1969 – Naomi Kawase born, Japanese film director, primarily of documentaries; 1997 Camera D’Or at the Cannes International Film Festival for Suzaku, 2007 Grand Prix at Cannes for The Mourning Forest, and 2017 Ecumenical Jury Prize at Cannes for Radiance.

May 30, 1975 – Marissa Mayer born, American information technology executive and computer scientist; president and CEO of Yahoo!, from 2012 until the sale of the company to Verizon in 2017; worked for Google (employee #20) (1999-2012), left her position as VP of Google Search Products and User Experience (2005-2012) to take over as head of Yahoo!

May 30, 2003 – In Burma (now Myanmar), after the National League for Democracy convoy was attacked, Aung San Suu Kyi tried to flee from the Depayin massacre, but was arrested. Seventy or more National League supporters were killed by a government-sponsored mob of around 5000, brought in a motorcade to Depayin, well-armed and placed at two killing sites. Before the motorcade arrived, local authorities warned area residents to stay indoors. Authorities systematically searched for and arrested survivors of the attack. The Asian Resource Centre declared the Depayin massacre a crime against humanity.

May 30, 2013 – Nigeria passes a law banning same-sex marriage.

May 30, 2017 – In Oregon, a 35-year-old man was arrested for stabbing three men and killing two of them, because they defended a young Muslim woman and her friend on a Portland train. The police reports said he was yelling racial and religious epithets during the attack. The self-described white nationalist appeared briefly in court, ranting: “Free speech or die, Portland. You got no safe place. This is America. Get out if you don’t like free speech. You call it terrorism, I call it patriotism. You hear me? Die.” He was charged with two counts of murder, and one count each of attempted murder, second-degree intimidation, and possession of a restricted weapon by a felon. On June 24, 2020, the killer was sentenced to two consecutive life terms—one for each count of first-degree murder—with no possibility of parole, and given 51.5 more years for related charges.

MemorialfortheMay302017stabbingvictimsatthePortlandtransitcenter.jpg — Memorial for the stabbing victims at the Portland transit center

May 30, 2020 – In Visalia, California, during a protest of the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, a Jeep flying a “Keep America Great” banner occupied by three white people, two males in the front, and a female in the back, accelerated directly at two women protesters, attempting to run them down. According to Visalia police, the women suffered minor injuries. The attack was videotaped, but the assailants were not identified. This followed an incident in Bakersfield, California, where a man drove his car into a crowd of protesters. That driver was arrested and charged with attempted murder.

May 30, 2021 – In the UK, Dina El-Hamamsy, senior obstetrics and gynaecology registrar, and her colleagues distributed anonymous questionnaires with diagrams to 171 women and 20 men attending general outpatient or urogynaecology clinics at a Manchester teaching hospital. Those surveyed were asked how many holes women have down below (in their private parts), and to name them. Fewer than half identified the correct number. Women were more likely to label the vagina and anus correctly than men. Half of those surveyed could not identify the urethra, while 37% mislabelled the clitoris – regardless of their gender. Meanwhile, just 46% correctly identified that women have three “holes” down below. “A lot of women don’t understand the difference between urinary incontinence and a prolapse. Also, when they put complaints in, there’s a lot of confusion about what their condition is, and how it should be addressed,” El-Hamamsy said. The team co-author Fiona Reid, a consultant urogynaecologist at St Mary’s hospital, Manchester, said: “We do see women who don’t understand that there is the urethra, the vagina and the anus. They seem to think that the urethra and the vagina are the same thing.” Participants were also asked to label as many structures as they could on the accompanying diagram, using their own words. Of those who attempted the labeling – and almost half left this section blank – just 9% labeled all seven structures correctly.

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May 31, 1443 – Margaret Beaufort born, English Countess of Richmond and Derby, mother of Henry VII, and influential matriarch of the House of Tudor; founder of St. John’s & Christ’s colleges at Cambridge; Lady Margaret Hall, the first Oxford college to admit women, was named for her.

May 31, 1531 – The “Women’s Revolt” in Amsterdam. Burgomasters ignored a petition by the pious women of Amsterdam not to desecrate a churchyard by building a wool storehouse there, and workmen began to dig the foundation. That night, 300 women with shovels replaced all the dirt.

Cornelis Anthonis map of Amsterdam circa 1544

May 31, 1577 – Nur Jahan born Mehr-un-Nissa, 20^th and last wife of Mughal Emperor Jahangir; she was married at 17 to Sher Afgan, governor of Mughal province of Bihar; legend says Prince Salim first met and fell in love with her while she was married to Sher Afgan. Two years after Prince Salim became Emperor Jahangir in 1605, Nur Jahan became a widow, but she grieved for her husband for three years before consenting to marry Jahangir in 1611. She was a 34 year old bride. After their wedding, she quickly became the most powerful and influential woman at court; Nur Jahan was a strong, charismatic, and well-educated woman. Most historians consider her the power behind the throne. Her husband granted her honors and privileges not given to any other Mughal empress, including being the only empress to have coinage struck in her name, and the only woman to be put in charge of the imperial seal. She was Jahangir’s most trusted advisor, and he conferred the title Nur Jahan (Light of the World) upon her. She was the aunt of the future Mumtaz Mahal (Jewel of the Palace), the beloved wife for whom Emperor Shah Jahan would build the Taj Majal, one of the most famous buildings in the world.

May 31, 1725 – Ahilyabai Holkar born, hereditary noble sardar (equivalent to the Arabic emir – a noble, often a ruler, or a military leader) of the Maratha Empire (1674-1818), in central India. Her husband was killed in battle in 1754, then her father-in-law died in 1766, and she became regent for her son, but he died a few months later, and she took over the affairs of the Holkar fief as sardar. She personally led armies into battle, shooting arrows from the back of an elephant, to protect her land from plundering invaders. Ahilyabai ordered the building of Hindu temples, and the rebuilding of the Kashi Vishwanath Temple, one of the holiest Hindi sites of pilgrimage, which had been desecrated, demolished, and converted into a mosque in 1696 by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. She also developed roads and forts, as well as rest-houses for pilgrims, wells for villages, and sponsored festivals. Merchants and farmers grew prosperous because she did not levy taxes on them. Her capital at Maheshwar became a center of literature, music, art, and industry. She was a patron of artists and craftsmen, and established a textile industry. When she died at the age of 70 in 1795, she was succeeded by her nephew, Tukoji Rao Holkar, who had long served as her commander-in-chief. Jawaharlal Nehru wrote of her, “The reign of Ahilyabai … lasted for thirty years. This has become almost legendary as a period during which perfect order and good government prevailed and the people prospered. She was a very able ruler and organizer, highly respected during her lifetime, and considered as a saint by a grateful people after her death.”

May 31, 1827 – Kusumoto Ine born, Japanese physician, first woman doctor of Western Medicine in Japan; her father was German physician Philipp Franz von Siebold. Following in his footsteps, her growing reputation won her the patronage of the feudal lord Date Munenari, Lord of Uwajima (1844-1858). She became a medical attendant for his women’s quarters. She studied obstetrics in Nagasaki with Antonius Bauduin, earning her midwife’s license in 1884, and attended the birth of the child of Emperor Meiji’s concubine Hamuro Mitsuko. She retired from practice in 1895, and died from food poisoning in 1903.

May 31, 1862 – Cynthia W. Alden born, American author, social worker, and journalist who worked for the New York Tribune and the Ladies Home Journal, founder of the Sunshine Society, a group which sent cards and letters to shut-ins, then expanded their mission to establish a sanatorium and a school for blind children, and she campaigned for legislation to provide care for blind children in 18 states. She is the author of Bushy, or Child Life in the Far West, Women’s Ways of Earning Money, and The Baby Bind.

May 31, 1875 – Rosa May Billinghurst born, British suffragette and women’s rights activist; she survived polio as a child, but had to wear leg irons and use crutches to walk. She became known is the “cripple suffragette” because she campaigned on a modified tricycle. As a young woman, she was active in social work at a Greenwich workhouse, taught Sunday School, and joined the temperance group, Band of Hope. In 1907, she became a member of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). Despite her disability she took part in the WSPU’s march to the Royal Albert Hall in June 1908. Billinghurst helped organise the WSPU’s response in the Haggerston by-election in July 1908. In 1910, she founded the Greenwich branch of the WSPU. As its first secretary she took part in the ‘Black Friday’ demonstrations, using her tricycle. Billinghurst would place her crutches on both sides of her tricycle and then charge any opposition. She was arrested after the police had capsized her from her tricycle. Billinghurst knew that she was helpless when this happened but she was quite prepared to take the added publicity to benefit the suffrage cause, but the police also exploited her disability, leaving her in a side street after letting her tyres down and pocketing the valves. She was arrested several more times in the next few years. The Glaswegian suffragette, Janie Allan, apparently worked in partnership with Billinghurst during the window-smashing campaign of March 1912, with Billinghurst apparently hiding a supply of stones under the rug that covered her knees. Her first stint in Holloway Prison was for smashing a window on Henrietta Street during this campaign, for which she was sentenced to one month’s hard labour. The prison authorities were confused by this sentence for a disabled woman, and gave her no extra work. On 8 January 1913, she was tried at the Old Bailey and sentenced to eight months in Holloway Prison for damaging letters in a postbox. She subsequently went on hunger strike, and was force-fed along with other suffragettes, but became so ill that she was released two weeks later. She spoke at a public meeting in West Hampstead in March 1913. On 24 May she chained herself to the gates of Buckingham Palace and on 14 June she was dressed in white on her trike in Emily Wilding Davison’s funeral procession after she became a martyr to the cause. Billinghurst took part in the mass deputation of suffragettes to petition King George V on 21 May 1914. Though she was not arrested, two policemen deliberately tipped her out of her tricycle, and another suffragette, Charlotte Drake, had to lift her back into it. Billinghurst stopped her activity for women’s suffrage after the Qualification of Women Act 1918 gave some women the vote. She later attended Emmeline Pankhurst’s funeral and the unveiling of Emmeline’s statue in 1930. She died in 1953, leaving her body to science.

May 31, 1905 – Florence Desmond born as Florence Dawson, English comedian, impersonator, actress, and singer. Made her stage debut at age 10, then left school at 15 in 1920, embarking on a successful career as an impersonator of famous stars, mainly appearing as a solo act, in musical reviews, or comedic plays, but also on the radio, and in movies. Her popular recording of the risqué song “The Deepest Shelter in Town” is featured in multiple WWII music compilations. She died at 87 in 1993.

May 31, 1912 – Chien-Shiung Wu born in China, American experimental physicist, pioneer in nuclear physics; she developed a process of enriching uranium to produce large quantities as fuel, worked on Manhattan Project during WWII, contributed to the development of the process for separating uranium metal into uranium-235 and uranium-238 isotopes by gaseous diffusion. In 1956, Wu devised ‘the Wu experiment’ to prove the theory proposed by her colleagues Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang, which would overturn a widely accepted law of physics called the Parity Law, that objects which are mirror images of each other would behave in the same way. Wu’s experiment spun radioactive cobalt-60 nuclei at low temperatures. If the law held, the electrons would shoot off in paired directions. Wu’s experiment demonstrated that they did not. Her work was termed the most important development in the field of atomic and nuclear physics up to that time. Lee and Yang received the Nobel Prize for disproving the Parity Law, but Wu’s contribution was ignored by the Nobel Committee. She was the first woman instructor at Princeton’s University’s Physics Department, the first Chinese-American elected to National Academy of Science (1958), and the first woman elected President of American Physical Society (1975). She received the National Medal of Science in 1975.

May 31, 1924 – Patricia Harris born, lawyer and ambassador, first African-American woman to: hold a Cabinet position as Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare (1979-83); serve as an Ambassador (Luxembourg, 1965); and head a law school (Howard University, 1969).

May 31, 1931 – Shirley Verrett born, African-American mezzo-soprano who successfully transitioned into soprano roles; known for her singing of works by Verdi and Donizetti. She performed at the New York City Opera, at the Cologne Opera, the Spoleto Festival, the Royal Opera House, the Lincoln Center, and the Metropolitan Opera, among many other notable venues. Her memoir, I Never Walked Alone, was published in 2003, and included the racism she encountered.

May 31, 1941 – Dame June Clark born, community nursing expert and advocate; president of the Royal College of Nursing (1990-1994); consultant to the International Council of Nurses on a project to develop an International Classification of Nursing Practice (ICNP), as well as consulting for WHO, and representing the UK on ICN and European Union committees. Following the break-up of the Soviet Union, she helped develop nursing leadership in Kazakhstan and Romania. She was also a visiting professor at the University of Promorska, Slovenia. Clark often speaks at international conferences.

May 31, 1946 – Krista Kilvet born, Estonian radio journalist at Eesti Radio, politician, and a leader of the restored Women’s Union, Estonia’s women’s movement; elected to the Riigikogu (Estonian Parliament – 1992-1998); appointed in 2008 as the Estonian ambassador to Norway and Iceland, but was unable to assume the office because of kidney disease; she died in January 2009.

May 31, 1948 – Svetlana Alexievich born, Belarusian investigative journalist and non-fiction writer in Russian about 20th century history; in 2015, became the first writer from Belarus to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature; her books Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from a Forgotten War and Chernobyl Prayer/Voices from Chernobyl have been translated into English.

May 31, 1955 – Lynne Truss born, English author, journalist, dramatist, and radio broadcaster; best known for her 2003 book, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.

May 31, 1961 – Lea Thompson born, American actress, director, and television producer; best known for playing Lorraine in the Back to the Future film trilogy, and as the title character in the sitcom Caroline in the City (1995-1999). She originally studied ballet, and became a member of the American Ballet Theatre’s Studio Company, but switched to acting after Mikhail Baryshnikov, ABT’s artistic director, told her, “You’re a lovely dancer, but you’re too stocky.” Thompson got critical acclaim for her performance in A Will of Their Own (1998), a television mini-series directed by Karen Arthur. Since 2005, she has made Jane Doe, a series of television movies for the Hallmark Channel, playing the title role, and also directing two of the productions. She played Marmee in the 2018 remake of Little Women, a modern day retelling of the story, which got mixed reviews.

May 31, 1994 – The death-toll in the Rwanda Genocide is reported to have reached at least 500,000, as the fighting between the Tutsi and the Hutu continues. The vast majority of the dead are Tutsi. By the middle of July, 1994, an estimated 70% of the Tutsi population will have been massacred and over 250,000 women raped.

May 31, 2009 – Dr. George Tiller, medical director of Women’s Healthcare Services, and a specialist in late-term abortions, is shot and killed while attending services at his church in Wichita, Kansas; his murderer, an anti-abortion terrorist, is convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

May 31, 2018 – The Danish Parliament passed a law that “anyone who wears a garment that hides the face in public will be punished with a fine.” While not specifically singling out Muslim women, it effectively bans them from wearing traditional clothing that hides the face, such as a niqab or burqa. The penalty is 1,000 kroner ($157) but it rises 10 times higher for repeat offenders. When the law took effect August 1, hundreds of protesters gathered in Copenhagen, Denmark’s capital. Amnesty International called the policy a “discriminatory violation of women’s rights.” In 2017, the European Court of Human Rights upheld a Belgian ban on full-face veils. France adopted Europe’s first burqa ban in 2011. Currently, a total of 16 nations have banned the burqa, most of them in Europe, but it has also been banned in Algeria, in the case of women workers while they are at their place of employment.

May 31, 2019 – The only remaining abortion clinic in Missouri remains open for now. Judge Michael F. Stelzer granted a temporary restraining order that allowed the St. Louis Planned Parenthood clinic to remain open. An ongoing dispute must be resolved between the clinic and the health department, which Governor Mike Parson (Republican) claims uncovered “a number of serious health concerns” during an audit, while the clinic argues the state’s demands have been unreasonable. The clinic did not lose its license, but after Dobbs, it provides care through Telehealth and advises on availability of abortion care in southern Illinois. In March 2023, the clinic filed a lawsuit against Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey over his demand that Planned Parenthood turn over a large number of records concerning transgender care, including HIPAA-protected patient health information.

May 31, 2020 – Katie Doan, a Whole Foods employee in Tustin, California, for three years, was fired for “time theft” when she took a 45-minute break to recover from a panic attack. For many Whole Foods employees and other grocery store workers around the country, working has been stressful and anxiety-inducing, in part because of the ever-present risk of catching Covid-19. Whole Foods is owned by Amazon, which has fired at least five employees since the start of the pandemic who all happened to be involved in union organizing among their co-workers. Doan believes she was really fired for creating a running count of Covid-19 cases among Whole Foods’ U.S. employees because Whole Foods and Amazon wouldn’t make the information publicly available. “Truth be told, I knew that I’d eventually be terminated for dissent. I knew I’d be fired because I’ve seen how Amazon treats its workers who are involved in organizing,” Doan said. “I just didn’t imagine it would come so swiftly, and over a panic attack that I had. I think Whole Foods really needs to figure out what their priorities are and allow workers to raise concerns.” A Whole Foods spokesperson denied Doan’s claims. Recent figures, drawn from numerous media sources, showed that over 340 Whole Foods workers had tested positive, and four employees had died.

May 31, 2020 – Linda Tirado, a freelance photographer, is one of dozens of reporters across the U.S. injured by police while covering the George Floyd protests. She was told by doctors that she will be permanently blind in her left eye after being shot with a “non-lethal” bullet by Minneapolis police. Others have been shoved to the ground, pepper-sprayed, and shot with rubber-coated bullets, several even as they were holding up their media IDs and shouting, “Press!” The Committee to Protect Journalists issued a safety advisory for reporters covering the protests, which includes avoiding working alone, and wearing protective gear, including body armor. The group also warned of the increased risk of contracting the coronavirus given the difficulty of maintaining social distancing.

May 31, 2021 – China announced that couples may now have up to three children, a major policy shift, after recent data showed a dramatic decline in births in the world’s most populous country. “To actively respond to the ageing of the population … a couple can have three children,” state media Xinhua reported, citing a meeting of China’s elite politburo leadership committee hosted by President Xi Jinping. China’s fertility rate stands at 1.3 – well below the level needed to maintain a stable population. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, there were officially 12 million babies born in 2020, 2.65 million fewer than were born in 2019, an 18% fall. Preliminary data released earlier in 2021, based on registered births, indicated a year-on-year drop of 15%. Jia Shicong, a 31-year-old education project manager, is married to engineer Hu Xuancheng, also 31. They have a one-year-old daughter. Shicong said, “When hearing the news today, my colleagues joked that unless the government rewards us with a flat and a degree for every single child we give birth to, the policy has nothing to do with us at all. Chinese couples – especially women – are less willing to give birth these days. This is because the pressure is too high in today’s society. After giving birth, as a woman, you are not likely to return to work any time soon due to childcare. The more babies you have, the more you’ll have to sacrifice in your career … Parents want the best of everything for their children, but the competition in China is way too fierce today … my generation of Chinese people is rather different from that of my parents. My parents’ generation lived for their children, but my generation lives for ourselves.”

Jia Shicong with her husband Hu Xuancheng and their daughter

May 31, 2022 – Belgium became the first country in the European Union (EU) to decriminalize sex work; the new labour code could grant paid time off and sick leave. “Decriminalisation will provide a clear framework with minimum conditions that can be controlled, so that problematic situations will be detected more quickly,” a Justice Ministry spokesperson in an email. Activists say the coronavirus pandemic was the catalyst for parliament’s March vote to remove sex work from the penal code. Lockdowns left sex workers with no income and – given their uncertain legal status – no unemployment benefits. “All of a sudden people were confronted with images of women standing in line on the streets, waiting here in Brussels to get food,” said Daan Bauwens, whose union of sex workers, Utsopi, was instrumental in getting the law changed.

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The Feminist Cats Learn About a Trailblazer
in Women’s Health Journalism

“According to the Western model, pregnancy is a disease, menopause is a disease, and even getting pregnant is a disease. Dangerous drugs and devices are given to women, but not to men – just for birth control. I’ve reached the conclusion that to many doctors BEING A WOMAN IS A DISEASE.”
– Barbara Seaman

Barbara Seaman was born September 11, 1935; American journalist, author, activist, and a principal founder of the feminist women’s health movement. In 1960, she was writing columns in traditional women’s magazines when the birth control pill first came on the market. She started a new kind of health reporting, writing articles that centered on the patient. Seaman was the first to write about the lack of information that most women had about child-bearing, breast-feeding, and oral contraceptives, making it difficult for them to make informed decisions about their own health. She alerted women to the dangers of “the Pill” – its primary ingredient being estrogen, which can increase the risk of getting some cancers, and has other harmful side-effects.

“Some women want to let their doctors do the worrying for them. But for those of us who don’t, it has been extremely difficult to get honest health information.”
– Barbara Seaman

She covered the founding of NOW (1966), the founding of NARAL (1969), and was a contributing editor at Ms. Magazine. She put a spotlight on the new kind of women’s self-help books like Our Bodies, Ourselves; Why Natural Childbirth; and Vaginal Politics.

Barbara Seaman at ‘The Pill’ Hearing in 1975

Her first book, The Doctor’s Case Against the Pill, published in 1969, led to Senator Gaylord Nelson’s ‘The Pill’ Hearing in 1975, and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare requiring a warning label and an informational insert, the first of its kind for any prescription drug, for each package of the Pill. Also in 1975, she was a co-founder of the National Women’s Health Network, a non-profit women’s health advocacy group.

Among the many books which she wrote, contributed to, or co-authored are Free and Female; For Women Only: Your Guide to Health Empowerment (with Gary Null); and Voices of the Women’s Health Movement, Volumes 1 & 2 (as a contributor). She died at age 72 of lung cancer in February 2008.

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May 2023 – Women Trailblazers and Activists, 5-25 through 5-31

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The Feminist Cats Learn About a Trailblazer
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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:

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The Feminist Cats Learn About a Trailblazer in Women’s Health Journalism

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

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The Feminist Cats Learn About a Trailblazer
in Women’s Health Journalism

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: