May 2023 – Women Trailblazers and Activists, 5-9 through 5-16

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May 9, 1865 – Elizabeth Garver Jordan born; American journalist, author, playwright, suffragist, editor of Harper’s Bazaar (1900-1913). Her first interview as a New York World reporter was with reclusive First Lady Caroline Harrison in 1890. She wrote “True Stories of the News,” a regular Sunday human interest feature, and covered the trial of Lizzie Borden. Her 1893 series on New York tenement conditions was later published as a book, The Submerged Tenth. In 1895, she published a short stories collection called Tales of the City Room. In 1897, she became assistant Sunday editor of the World. Jordan was an active suffragist and in 1917 organized collaborative novel, The Sturdy Oak, with fourteen authors supporting the cause, including Fannie Hurst, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Mary Heaton Vorse, Alice Duer Miller, and Ethel Watts Mumford. The novel was serialized in Collier’s Weekly. She also collaborated with suffrage leader Anna Howard Shaw on Shaw’s autobiography, The Story of a Pioneer (1915).

May 9, 1874 – Lilian Baylis born, English theatrical producer and manager, founder of the Old Vic Theatre, famed for its Shakespearean productions. She also managed the Sadler’s Wells theatre. Baylis was instrumental in these companies evolving into the UK’s National Theatre, and The Royal Ballet. She nurtured the careers of Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Peggy Ashcroft, Sybil Thorndike, Edith Evans, Alec Guinness, and director Tyrone Guthrie.

May 9, 1905 – Lilí Álvarez born in Rome to Spanish parents, Spanish athlete, author, journalist, and feminist. She was an ice skater, alpine skier, equestrian, and auto racer, but best known as a pioneer in women’s tennis. She won three consecutive finals at Wimbledon (1926-1927-1928), and with Dutch player Kea Bouman, won the women’s doubles title in 1929 at the French Championships. In 1931, she caused controversy by wearing robe-pants – a divided tennis skirt – at Wimbledon. Also in 1931, she began reporting for Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper on the political events in Spain. In 1934, Álvarez married Jean de Gaillard de la Valdène, the Count of Valdène, but in 1939, their only child died, and they separated. She returned home to Spain in 1941, where she continued to be active in sports and began writing on religious and feminist topics, publishing her book Plenitud (Fullness) in 1946. She actively supported the worldwide feminist movement and in 1951 gave a speech entitled “La batalla de la feminidad” (The battle of femininity) at the Hispanic-American Feminist Congress. She died at age 93 in Madrid in 1998.

May 9, 1906 – Sarah Patton Boyle born, Virginia writer, supported immediate integration in 1962 with “The Desegregated Heart,” was arrested and jailed in St. Augustine (1964), and fought against age discrimination in the 1970s and 1980s.

May 9, 1910 – Barbara Woodhouse born in Ireland, British dog and horse trainer, author, and television presenter. Her 1980 television series Training Dogs the Woodhouse Way made her a household name.

May 9, 1914 – Patricia Swift Blalock born, American librarian, social worker, and civil rights activist in Alabama. After earning a master’s degree in social work from the University of Chicago, in 1937 she went to work for the Alabama State Department of Education and Rehabilitation, as district supervisor of the State Crippled Children’s Services, but retired in 1946 after she married and had a child. In 1951, she began working as a part-time assistant in the Dallas County Public Library, the only library in Selma. After ten years, the library director became seriously ill, and Blalock became the acting director. When the library board asked her to become the permanent director she hesitated because she did not have a degree in librarianship, but the board expressed their confidence, and she assumed the permanent position in 1963. Because Selma did not have a separate library for black patrons, they were served through the library’s back door by the library’s maid. When Blalock became the library’s director, one of her first priorities was desegregating the library. The real political power in Selma at the time was the White Citizens’ Council, founded in 1955 to protect the status quo in Selma from “outside agitators” because of the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Selma’s Mayor, Chris Heinz, and Judge Bernard Reynolds were members, but were also ex officio library board members. Blalock met individually with each regular member of the library’s board to convince them desegregation was inevitable. She cited recent integration orders by the federal government in Montgomery and protests in Birmingham. She argued Selma should take control of its integration process rather than have outsiders do it for them. By May, 1963, she told the Board that a protest of the library’s segregation policies was eminent, and she might not even be able to open on the library on Monday without some kind of desegregation plan in place. An emergency meeting of the board was held at her home. The resulting plan was far from what she sought, but it was a beginning. The library would be closed from Monday, May 13 to Sunday, May 19. When it reopened the following Monday, all its chairs were removed to prevent black and white patrons from sitting together. The desegregation was not publicly announced. All library card applicants would be required to provide two references. On May 20, 1963, the library reopened. Library visitors who asked about the chairs were told they were stored temporarily in the basement. Black patrons, not informed of the policy change, were slow to enter the library, but by November, they were becoming more common. Blalock took a few chairs out of storage, and scattered them around the library, slowly adding a few more at a time. She also pushed for integration of the library staff. Annie Molette, the library maid who had quietly served Selma’s black readers through the back door, was promoted as the first Black library assistant in the city, and a new library maid was hired to do the official parts of the job. Some white library patrons didn’t react well to the new policies. One white man angrily tore up his library card, and vowed never to return. When he came back two weeks later to check out a book, Blalock handed him his card, which she had carefully taped back together. In 1988, she retired. In 1992, the Alabama Library Association honored her with its Distinguished Service Award. In ‘retirement’ she served two terms as director of the Selma and Dallas County Chamber of Commerce, chaired the Tale Telling Association, and was a two-term vice president of the Selma and Dallas Tourism Council, among other commitments. She also helped found the Selma Performing Arts Center. In 2000, she was the recipient of a Librarian of the Year for Exceptional Leadership award from the International Library Science Honor Society. Her daughter Irene also became a librarian and was Director of the Birmingham Public Library when she retired in 2014.

May 9, 1917 – Fay Kanin born, American screenwriter, playwright, and producer; second woman president (1979-1983) of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In the early 1950s, she and her husband were blacklisted for two years by the HUAC because she had taken classes at the Actors Lab in Hollywood – teachers there were suspected of being communist sympathizers – and because the Kanins were members of the Hollywood Writers Mobilization, a WWII group which supported U.S. war efforts. Kanin won Emmy Awards for Best Writing in Drama and Writer of the Year (Television Special) for her original teleplay for Tell Me Where It Hurts (1974) and another Emmy as a producer on the TV movie drama Friendly Fire (1979) with Carol Burnett. She died at age 95 in 2013.

May 9, 1921 – Sophie Scholl born, German student-activist, member of the White Rose non-violent resistance group in Nazi Germany; in 1943, she was convicted of high treason for distributing anti-war leaflets, and executed by guillotine.

May 9, 1921 – Mona Van Duyn born, American poet and editor; U.S. Poet Laureate (1992-1993). She won the Bollingen Prize (1971); National Book Award for Poetry (1971); Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts (1972); Shelley Memorial Award (1987); Ruth Lily Poetry Prize (1989); and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1991). She taught at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the 1940s. Van Duyn was co-founder and co-editor with her husband Jarvis Thurston of Perspective: A Quarterly of Literature and the Arts (1947-1975). Her many poetry collections include: A Time of Bees; To See, To Take: Poems (National Book Award winner); Near Changes (Pulitzer Prize for Poetry); Firefall; and If It Be Not I: Collected Poems, 1959-1982. She died at age 83 of bone cancer in December 2004.

May 9, 1936 – Glenda Jackson born, British actress and Labour politician; Royal Shakespeare Company member (1964-1968); awarded two Academy Awards for Best Actress for Women in Love and Touch of Class; also gave notable performances in the BBC TV series Elizabeth R and the film Sunday Bloody Sunday. Member of Parliament (1992-2015); outspoken critic of the Blair government, especially plans to raise education tuition fees in Britain. She pushed for Tony Blair’s resignation following the Judicial Enquiry into his reasons for going to war in Iraq.

May 9, 1946 – Ayşe Nur Zarakolu born, Turkish author, publisher, and human rights advocate; co-founder of Belge publishing house (fire-bombed in 1995); as director of Cemmay, a book-distribution company, she was the first Turkish woman hired as a company director. A relentless challenger to repressive Turkish press laws, she helped publicize the Armenian Genocide and the plight of Kurdish people living within its borders in spite of government bans on mentioning them. Imprisoned multiple times for her publications, Amnesty International designated her as a prisoner of conscience. The International Publishers Association honored her with its inaugural International Freedom to Publish Award in 1998, but Turkish authorities confiscated her passport and she wasn’t allowed to attend the ceremony. In 2004, the European Court of Human Rights condemned Turkey for convicting Zarakolu for publishing a book about journalist Ferhat Tepe, murdered by the militant ultra-nationalist Turkish Revenge Brigade (used by Turkish military intelligence in operations against Kurdish insurgents). She died of cancer at age 55 in 2002. İnsan Hakları Derneği (İHD), a Turkish human rights organization she helped found, bestows the Ayşe Zarakolu Freedom of Thought prize in her honor.

May 9, 1953 – Eleanor Roosevelt lobbied Congress for a National Teachers’ Day. In 1985, the National PTA expanded her idea into Teacher Appreciation Week, held during the first full week in May, and co-sponsored by the National Education Association.

May 9, 1960 – The Food and Drug Administration announced approval of birth control as an additional indication for Searle’s Enovid, making it the world’s first approved oral contraceptive pill.

May 9, 1968 – Ruth Kelly born, British Labour politician; Member of Parliament (1997-2010); served as Minister for Women and Equality (2006-2007).

May 9, 1970 – Helen Hill born, American artist, filmmaker, writer, songwriter, and peace activist; her 1995 animated film, Scratch and Crow, was named in 2009 to the National Film Registry for its significance. Her film The Florestine Collection was completed by Paul Gailiunas in 2011, four years after she was murdered by an unidentified intruder in her New Orleans home. Her murder has yet to be solved.

Helen Hill — still from ‘Scratch and Crow’

May 9, 1975 – Tamia born as Tamia Marilyn Washington, Canadian singer-songwriter, producer, and founder of her own label, Plus One Music Group. Her songs “So Into You,” “Stranger in My House,” “Imagination,” and “Leave It Smokin’” were hit singles on the pop and R&B charts. She was diagnosed in 2003 with multiple sclerosis (MS), and is an advocate for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.

May 9, 1979 – Rosario Dawson born, American film actress, producer, and activist; known for Rent, Seven Pounds, Cesar Chavez, and Top Five. She won an NAACP Outstanding Actress Image Award in 2009 for Seven Pounds. Dawson was arrested in 2004 for protesting against George Bush’s policies, and again in 2016 during a Democracy Spring protest. She is an active supporter of Lower East Side Girls Club, Global Cool, Amnesty International, and a spokesperson for Doctors Without Borders, Conservation International, and The Nature Conservancy. In 2008, she did a voiceover for the RESPECT! Campaign, aimed at domestic violence. Dawson is on the board of Scenarios USA, which aims at developing reflective, outspoken, and confident youth through filmmaking.

May 9, 2018 – The Mormon Church severed ties with the Boy Scouts of America after 105 years. The decision, made jointly with the Boy Scouts, went into effect later in 2018. Mormons account for 19 percent of the Boy Scouts’ 2.3 million members. The church’s decision came after the Boy Scouts reversed a century-old policy by announcing it would admit transgender boys, and later announced it would start allowing girls aged 11 to 17 to join, beginning in February 2019, although individual scout groups would still be largely single-gender. They are also changing their name to Scouts BSA. The Cub Scouts program for ages 7 to 10 had already admitted 3,000 girls.

May 9, 2020 – A report by Member of Parliament Rosena Allin-Khan on social media went viral. She is also an A&E (British term for ER) doctor and intensive care specialist who worked 12-hour hospital shifts since the pandemic began. On May 5, when Dr. Allin-Khan reported that government failures were contributing to a greater loss of life, and she wanted answers on its testing strategy, Health Secretary Matt Hancock responded by suggesting that Allin-Khan’s testimony was untrue and moreover, that she “might do well to take a leaf out of the shadow secretary of state’s book in terms of tone.” Dr. Allin-Khan said in disbelief, “Watch your tone! I have written to the government several times since March, asking why we haven’t followed WHO guidelines, asking for clearer messaging on social distancing, urging for more PPE. I’ve had no response. I was bringing messages from the frontline.” Being patronised by Hancock was one thing, but to be dismissed by the Health Secretary on the same day that the UK reported the highest death toll in Europe galled her. “I was very courteous in my delivery. If Matt Hancock found it difficult, that’s on him. Addressing the fact that lives could have been saved and families’ hearts might not have been broken had we got on top of testing earlier? These are legitimate questions that people all across the country have … He didn’t like the content, so instead felt it easier to make a derogatory comment towards me.” Allin-Khan, whose mother is Polish and father is Pakistani, says, “People are still confused by who I am or what I am. The biggest learning journey I have had as a politician is seeing how much I can be hated for being eastern European, for being Pakistani, for being Muslim. I never came from a political background. The vitriol shocked me.” She overcame many obstacles to read medicine at Cambridge, and also earned a master’s in public health before working in disaster zones across the globe. In March, 2020, she began treating Covid-19 patients at St. George’s Hospital in South London, and at the NHS Nightingale Hospital which opened April 1, 2020, specifically for Coronavirus cases. “Families are begging me for a miracle I can’t give them. You’re unable to console them with a hug or a touch on the shoulder. You have to watch their hearts break, you’re the one delivering goodbye messages to their loved ones,” Allin-Khan takes a pause. “Messages like ‘please hold on, Dad’, ‘please hold on for the kids’ – it puts chills through your body but you have to hold it together and stay strong for these families. It is very hard to do.”

May 9, 2021 – In March, 2021, lawyer and human rights activist Najla El-Mangoush became the first woman appointed as Libya’s foreign minister. She was chosen by Abdelhamid Dbeibah, the country’s interim prime minister, after he faced a backlash for backtracking on promises that 30% of ministerial posts would go to women. Mangoush was subjected to a barrage of abuse, threats, and pressure to resign after she called for foreign troops and mercenaries to leave Libya. On May 8, a militia in Tripoli stormed a hotel used previously by the unity government. On security footage from the hotel, the militia can be heard asking about Mangoush’s whereabouts and searching cars. The radical Islamist cleric Sadiq al-Gharyani, who lives in Turkey, criticised Mangoush on his TV channel Al-Tanasuh, describing her as “mean, despicable, and serving the Zionist project.” The vitriol aimed at Mangoush put her life at risk. Her opponents claim her calls for Turkey to leave have not been matched by criticism of the presence of Russian mercenaries from the Wagner group, which has links to Khalifa Haftar, commander of the Libyan National Army, described as “Libya’s most potent warlord.” Mangoush’s supporters say she has been even-handed in her call for all troops to leave, and clips of remarks she had made in 2019 now circulating on social media were edited to excise her criticisms of Haftar. The U.S. ambassador to Libya, Richard Norland, defended Mangoush, saying the criticism must stop. “We fully support foreign minister Mangoush’s unambiguous call for the departure of foreign forces in the interest of Libyan sovereignty and stability,” he said.

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May 10, 1872 – Victoria Woodhull becomes the first woman nominated for President of the United States, by the Equal Rights Party.

May 10, 1888 – Lucy Wills born, English haematologist; conducted important research in India on macrocytic anemia in pregnancy, which produces unusually large red blood cells that are low in hemoglobin, and is caused by deficiencies in B vitamins, most critically folate (B-9), which was discovered by Wills. She was part of the wave of young British women who took advantage of the reforms achieved by 19^th century feminists making higher education available to women. After attending Cheltenham Ladies’ College and Newnham College Cambridge, she sat for the University of Cambridge Tripos (examinations) in 1910, and did well, but women were not allowed to receive a Cambridge degree until 1947. In 1915, she enrolled at the London (Royal Free Hospital) School of Medicine for Women, part of the University of London, the first medical school in Britain to train women. The Royal Free Hospital was the first to allow women access to the wards and outpatient departments. In 1920, Wills became a legally qualified medical practitioner with the qualification of Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians London, and with University of London degrees of Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery. She was 32 years old, and decided not to practice medicine. Instead, she went into research, focusing on metabolic studies of pregnancy, and teaching in the Department of Pregnant Pathology at the Royal Free Hospital. In 1928, she went to India, and began her seminal work on macrocytic anemia in pregnancy, and spent most of her time there from 1928 to 1933, when she returned full-time to the Royal Free, aside from a 10-week working trip to India in 1937-1938, when she travelled for the first time by airplane. She noticed that macrocytic anemia was much more prevalent among poor Muslim women, and did lab experiments with albino rats, discovering that the addition of yeast extracts to synthetic diets prevented the anemia. She then tried using yeast extracts on human patients with macrocytic anemia, and found that they both prevented and cured the anemia. She co-published her results with M.M. Mechta in 1931, in the British Medical Journal. Willis retired from the Royal Free Hospital in 1947 after establishing the hospital’s first haematology department, but during WWII she also served as a pathologist in the Emergency Medical Service.

May 10, 1893 – Tonita Peña born, renowned influential American Pueblo artist and teacher. Best known for using pen and ink embellished with watercolor to depict Native American daily life and traditional ceremonies.

May 10, 1898 – Ariel Durant born in Russia, American historian and co-author with her husband Will Durant of the eleven-volume The Story of Civilization, published between 1935 and 1975.

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May 10, 1900 – Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin born, British astronomer and astrophysicist, first person to receive a Ph.D. in astronomy from Radcliffe. She was the first to apply laws of atomic physics to the study of the temperature and density of stellar bodies, and the first to conclude that hydrogen and helium are the two most common elements in the universe. She first proposed the theory that the composition of the Sun was 99% hydrogen with helium, and 1% metals, in her 1925 thesis, Stellar Atmospheres; A Contribution to the Observational Study of High Temperature in the Reversing Layers of Stars, but it contradicted the prevailing scientific consensus, and was ignored. It was confirmed in 1929 by Henry Norris Russell, who is often mistakenly given credit for the discovery, even though he acknowledged Payne’s work in his paper. Astronomer Otto Struve later described her work as “the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy.” Jeremy Knowles, dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, said: “Since her death in 1979, the woman who discovered what the universe is made of has not so much as received a memorial plaque. Her newspaper obituaries do not mention her greatest astronomy discovery … Every high school student knows … Newton discovered relativity, Darwin discovered evolution, even that Einstein discovered relativity. But when it comes to the composition of our universe, the textbooks simply say that the most prevalent element in the universe is hydrogen. And no one ever wonders how we know … the department categorized her small salary under ‘equipment’ …” Her lectures were not listed in the Harvard course catalog until 1943. She was the first woman to be promoted from within the faculty of the department in 1956, and then became the first woman to head a department at Harvard when she was appointed as the Chair of Harvard’s Department of Astronomy.

May 10, 1918 – Diva Diniz Corrêa born, Brazilian marine zoologist; first woman director of the Department of Zoology of the University of São Paulo.

May 10, 1919 – Ella Grasso born, American Democratic politician, daughter of Italian immigrants; Governor of Connecticut (1975-1980), first woman elected as governor of a U.S. state who wasn’t the wife or widow of a past governor; U.S. Congresswoman (D-CT 1971-1975); Connecticut Secretary of State (1959-1971); Connecticut State House of Representatives (1952-1957), where she was the first woman elected as Floor Leader (1955).

May 10, 1927 – Nayantara Sahgal born, Indian author who writes in English, one of India’s first women authors whose work is widely recognised; noted for The Day in Shadow; Plans for Departure; and The Fate of Butterflies. She was awarded the 1986 Sahitya Akademi Award for her novel Rich Like Us. Her daughter Gita Sahgal is a controversial feminist writer, human rights activist, and documentary filmmaker.

May 10, 1934 – Jayne Cortez born as Sallie Jayne Richardson, African-American poet, musician, spoken-word performer, small press publisher, and civil rights activist. She collaborated with Fannie Lou Hamer on work used to rally registering Black voters in Mississippi. Cortez was a founder and artistic director (1964-1970) of the Watts Repertory Theater Company. In 1969, she published her first poetry collection, Pissstained Stairs and the Monkey Man’s Wares. She has since published eleven other poetry collections, including Mouth on Paper, Firespitter, Coagulations: New and Selected Poems, and On the Imperial Highway, and has made numerous recordings of her work.

May 10, 1944 – Marie-France Pisier born in French Indochina, French actress, screenwriter, novelist, and director; she appeared in over 70 films, including Cousin Cousine; author of the novel, Le Bal du gouverneur (The Governor’s Ball), she also wrote the screenplay based on her book for the 1990 film, which was her directorial debut; in 2002, she directed Comme un avion (Like an Airplane).

May 10, 1950 – Natalya Bondarchuk born in the Soviet Union, Soviet and Russian actress, screenwriter, stage and film director; she also heads a child opera theatre in Moscow; noted for writing and directing the 2oo6 film, Pushkin: Poslednyaya Duel.

May 10, 1954 – Diane E. Benson born, of Norwegian ancestry on her father’s side and Tlingit ancestry on her mother’s side, her tribal identity is T’akdeintaan (Sea Tern crest of the Raven Moiety) and of the Tax’ Hit (Snail House); politician, inspirational speaker, writer, and dramatist. In 2010, she was the Democratic candidate for Lt. Governor of Alaska, but lost in the general election. She is an advocate for better healthcare for veterans injured during their military service.

May 10, 1958 – Ellen Ochoa born, first Mexican-American woman in space. Engineer Ellen Ochoa’s first mission aboard STS-56 ATLAS-2 Discovery in 1993. Since then, she’s logged nearly 1,000 hours in orbit. Ochoa served as Director (2013-2018) of NASA’s Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, the first Latina and the second woman to hold the title.

May 10, 1963 – Debbie Wiseman born, English composer and conductor for film and television; Visiting Professor at the Royal College of Music; her film scores include Tom and Viv, Before You Go, and Lesbian Vampire Killers; for TV, she did the scores for Wolf Hall; The Promise; and A Poet in New York.

May 10, 1973 – Leigh Sales born, Australian journalist and author; host of Australian channel ABC’s flagship news and current affairs program, 7:30 (2011-2022). Author of Detainee 002: The Case of David Hicks (2007); On Doubt (2009); and Any Ordinary Day (2018). In 2019, she was awarded an Order of Australia for her services to broadcast journalism.

May 10, 1981 – Katori Hall born, American playwright, screenwriter, producer, director, and actress; known for her plays Children of Killers, The Mountaintop, and The Hot Wing King, for which she won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and the musical Tina, based on the life of Tina Turner. She also created the Starz television series P-Valley, and has written essays and articles for the Boston Globe, the New York Times, and Essence magazine.

May 10, 2004 – Gloria Macapagal Arroyo wins election to a full term as president of the Philippines. As vice president in 2001, she replaced Joseph Estrada after he was accused of corruption and forced out of office.

May 10, 2010 – President Obama nominates Elena Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court. Kagan was U.S. Solicitor General (2009-2010), and had been Dean of Harvard Law School (2003-2009).

May 10, 2019 – Pope Francis met with women religious from 80 countries, attendees at the International Union of Superiors General. Asked about the possibility of women deacons in the church’s future, the Pope claimed he could not do something not developed from the truths about the faith “revealed by God.” Pope Francis also said, concerning the ongoing scandal over abuse suffered by Catholic women religious: “It’s a serious problem, a grave problem. It’s not just sexual abuse; it is also the abuse of power, the abuse of conscience.”

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May 10, 2020 – In California, over a dozen migrant women were released from the Mesa Verde detention center in Bakersfield after they held a hunger strike to demand release from the facility’s squalid and crowded conditions. The for-profit private prison is run by GEO Group, which has a history of problems, from facilities being shut down for horrific living conditions to several wrongful death lawsuits.

May 10, 2021 – Argentina’s first national Director of Economy, Equality, and Gender Mercedes D’Alessandro, along with Vilma Ibarra, top legal advisor to President Alberto Fernánandez, author of a landmark bill to legalize abortion; and Elizabeth Gómez Alcorta, Argentina’s inaugural Minister of Women, Genders and Diversity, are driving radical change. Elizabeth Gómez Alcorta said, “From Day One of his administration, President Fernández said he was going to start at the bottom, with the most disadvantaged, and there is no doubt that it is always women who are worse off in all societies; especially poor women.” When Covid-19 struck, the trio worked across government departments and organizations to classify shelters for survivors of gender-based violence as essential services during the lockdown. They turned pharmacies into spaces where survivors could use a code word (“red face mask”) to discreetly indicate they were being abused so that the pharmacist would then call the police for them. They set up emergency food delivery systems and sent cash payments to the unemployed, as well as informal workers and domestic helpers — a majority of whom are women — to make up for lost income. The UN ranked Argentina as having the highest number of gender-sensitive Covid-19 responses in the world. Mercedes D’Alessandro said, “The emergency family allowance was done with the understanding that many women work in the informal sector. So when we introduced the support measure, we focused specifically on women in precarious positions. We also gave women access to this emergency allowance if they work at home, so-called housewives. This was a way to recognize unremunerated, unpaid work … We understand that the work done by women at home, including care work, is a fundamental pillar of social life and the economy. Often, when you use the word “worker,” you think about someone collecting a salary. But here, we look at a “worker” as someone who does work, even if it’s unpaid, to support her family.”

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May 11, 1771 – Laskarina Bouboulina born, Greek naval commander, heroine of the Greek War of Independence in 1821; when her second husband was killed fighting Algerian pirates, she took over his fortune and his trading business and had four more ships built at her own expense, including the large warship Agamemnon. When the Turks tried to confiscate her property because her husband had fought with the Russians in the Turko-Russian wars, she met with Russian Ambassador Pavel Stroganov, and gained Russian protection. The Agamemnon was one of the largest warships in the hands of Greek rebels, and she spent much of her fortune on arms and food for the men under her command, taking part in naval blockades and capturing cities held by the Turks, including Tripolis, where she saved most of the female members of the sultan’s household. After her death, Emperor Alexander I of Russia granted her the honorary rank of Admiral of the Imperial Russian Navy, making her the only woman in world naval history to hold that rank until 1972, when Alene Duerk was promoted to Rear Admiral in the U.S. Navy.

May 11, 1817 – Fanny Cerrito born, Italian prima ballerina and choreographer of Rosida; one of the few women in the 19th Century to be acclaimed as a choreographer.

May 11, 1838 – Isabelle Bogelot born, French philanthropist, feminist, and author; she set up temporary shelters for women and children, and transitional housing for women released from prison. Bogelot also campaigned for major reforms at the infamous women’s prison, St. Lazare. Co-founder in 1901 of the National Council of French Women (CNFF). Author of Trente ans de solidarité (Thirty Years of Solitude).

May 11, 1875 – Harriet Quimby born, American pilot and screenwriter; first woman granted a U.S. pilot’s license, and the first woman to fly solo across the English Channel. In May 1912, she left England in a 50-hp monoplane lent to her by Louis Blériot. She headed for France in a plane she had never flown before, with a compass she had just learned how to use. Despite poor visibility and fog, Quimby landed 59 minutes later near Hardelot, France, where she was greeted by the local residents. But the sinking of the Titanic overshadowed reporting of Quimby’s achievement in the world press. She was killed in July, 1912, when she lost control of her plane at a flying exhibition near Quincy, Massachusetts.

May 11, 1884 – Alma Gluck born in Romania, American operatic soprano, one of the most famous singers of her generation, and a pioneer in operatic vocal recordings.

May 11, 1894 – Martha Graham born, American dancer and choreographer, had tremendous impact on modern dance over her 70 year career, founder of the oldest modern dance company in the U.S., and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

May 11, 1901 – Rose Ausländer born in Cernauti, Austria-Hungary, lived in the U.S and Germany, Jewish poet who wrote in both German and English, editor of the U.S. German language newspaper Westlicher Herold; most of the copies of her first books of poems were destroyed when the Nazis occupied Cernauti in 1941.

May 11, 1902 – Edna E. Kramer born, American mathematician, daughter of Jewish immigrants; she earned a Ph.D. in mathematics, with a minor in physics, from Columbia University in 1930 while she was also teaching high school classes. She then became the first woman instructor of mathematics at New Jersey State Teachers College. In 1934, during the Depression, she took a teaching position with the New York City School system, and served as acting chair of the department. During 1943-1945 she worked long hours at Jefferson High School, then long evenings at Columbia University. Later she worked in the university’s Division of War Research under the office of Scientific Research and Development in Washington, D.C. In 1948, she began her lasting affiliation with New York Polytechnic Institute, moving from adjunct instructor to adjunct professor in 1953. Kramer belonged to the American Mathematical Society, the Mathematics Association of America, the Association for Women in Mathematics, the American Association for Advancement of Sciences, the History of Science Society, and the New York Academy of Science. Kramer retired from the New York City school system in 1956 and New York Polytechnic Institute in 1965. Her best-known book, The Nature and Growth of Modern Mathematics, was published in 1970.

May 11, 1905 – Catherine Bauer Wurster born, influential American urban planner, author, and public housing advocate; Modern Housing.

May 11, 1905 – Lise de Baissac born in Mauritius of French descent and British nationality. Her family moved to Paris in 1919. After the Nazis occupied Paris in 1940, she and her brother Claude spent months on a circuitous journey through France, Spain, and Portugal before reaching Gibraltar and taking a ship to Great Britain. Her brother was quickly recruited by the Special Operations Executive, and as soon as the SOE began recruiting women, she applied to join. She was trained to be an agent, but “officially” was commissioned in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry in July 1942. In September, she and Andrée Borrel were the first women SOE agents to be parachuted into central France. They established a safe house, and Lise was a courier and liaison for several networks, including the Scientist network her brother Claude set up. She also organized the pick-ups of arms drops from the UK for the French resistance, and took part in some armed attacks on enemy columns. In 1943, her next assignment was helping to train new agents, after the Gestapo penetrated several networks, and she and Claude were flown back to England. They returned to France in 1944, to reconnoiter possible landing sites for airborne troops during D-Day which would be defensible while they were getting established. Afterwards, she gathered information on German troop dispositions while renting a room in a house occupied by the local commander of German Forces. After the war, she was honored with medals from both the British and French governments, and lived to the age of 98.

May 11, 1906 – Ethel Weed born, U.S. Women’s Army Corp Lieutenant and Women’s Information Officer, promoted women’s rights and suffrage in post-WWII Japan. She pressed tirelessly for revisions to the Japanese Civil Code of 1898, promoting women’s issues through a weekly “Women’s Hour” radio program, and toured Japan before the 1946 election, which was the first time in Japanese history that women could vote. Japanese women’s grievances included their inability to hold a cheating husband accountable, and an absence of legal rights for women who remarried. The new Civil Code of 1948 was greatly influenced by Weed and her dedicated team. In the document’s own words: “This Code must be construed in accordance with honoring the dignity of individuals and the essential equality of both sexes.”

Lt Ethel Weed with Japanese Women’s Rights Advocates

May 11, 1918 – Mrinalini Sarabhai born in British India, Indian classical dancer and choreographer of over 300 dance dramas; founder and director of the Darpana Academy of Performing Arts in Ahmedabad; chair of the Gujarat State Handicrafts and Handloom Development Corporation; honored in 1992 by the Indian government with the Padma Bhushan, its third highest civilian award.

May 11, 1929 – Annie Webb Blanton, American educator, suffragist, and author of grammar textbooks, founds the Delta Kappa Gamma Society International in Austin, Texas, to improve opportunities for women educators and promote excellence in education.

May 11, 1933 – Anna M. McCann born, American art historian, archaeologist and academic; in the early 1960s, scuba diving with Jacques Cousteau exploring ancient Roman shipwrecks made her the first American woman underwater archaeologist; author of Roman Sarcophagi in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

May 11, 1954 – Judith Weir born, British composer and Master of the Queen’s Music; noted for operas, The Vanishing Bridegroom, Armida, and Miss Fortune.

May 11, 1995 – Shira Haas born, Israeli actress, noted for playing the daughter in The Zookeeper’s Wife; nominated for a Golden Globe and a Primetime Emmy for the Netflix series Unorthodox (2020 – ), the first Israeli to be nominated for an acting Primetime Emmy Award.

May 11, 2016 – A Colorado judge declared that the 57-year-old man who went on a shooting rampage that left three dead, including a police officer, and nine wounded, at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic in 2015 was not competent to stand trial. The shooter interrupted court proceedings with angry outbursts, yelling that he was a “warrior for the babies.” The shooter faced 179 counts, including first-degree murder charges. The judge’s decision meant the shooter would be indefinitely confined to a state mental hospital. In November 2019, a federal grand jury in Denver returned a 68-count indictment against him. In September 2022, a federal judge ordered him to be involuntarily medicated so he might become competent enough to stand trial, but the order was put on hold while it was appealed by the shooter’s attorneys.

May 11, 2016 – Italy’s Parliament gave final approval to a law recognizing civil unions between same-sex partners, after an extended battle which was largely due to opposition from the Catholic Church. LGBTQ rights activists celebrated the bill’s approval, but expressed disappointment that a provision allowing gay couples to adopt had to be dropped to ensure the bill would pass.

May 11, 2018 – Scientists at Silent Spring Institute in Massachusetts issued the results of a study of 18 hair care products commonly used by black women. They found a total of 45 known endocrine disruptors, with each product containing at least six of the disrupting chemicals. Eleven of the 18 products contained chemicals prohibited in the European Union or regulated under California’s Proposition 65. Hair relaxers marketed for children had the highest levels of five such chemicals. The study also found that 84% of the harmful chemicals detected were not listed on the product label. African American women have higher rates of hormone-linked problems such as preterm birth, uterine fibroids, and infertility than other groups of women. Their rates of breast cancer and endometrial cancer are also on the rise. “Chemicals in hair products, and beauty products in general, are mostly untested and largely unregulated,” said study author Jessica Helm. “This study is a first step toward uncovering what harmful substances are in products frequently used by black women, so we can better understand what’s driving some of the health issues they’re facing.”

May 11, 2020 – UN Women and the African Union, in partnership with the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), hosted an inaugural online roundtable of African Ministers for Gender and Women’s Affairs, under the theme “COVID-19 Response and Recovery – a Gendered Framework.” Focused on how to mitigate the impacts of Covid-19 on African women and girls, the meeting was co-chaired by UN Women’s Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka and Beatrice Lomeya Atilite, chair of the African Union Specialized Technical Committee on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment. Discussion centered on key lessons learned and good practices in gender-responsive crisis management and mitigation, and strategic priorities to advocate for a gender-responsive crisis management and response, and for a gender-transformative recovery framework. It also identified actions to be prioritized at regional and country levels. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka tweeted, “We’re asking governments across #Africa to make sure that women are fully engaged in the #COVID19 response and recovery efforts.”

Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka and Beatrice Lomeya Atilite

May 11, 2021 – A new study published in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology by Northwestern Medicine of the placentas from patients who received the COVID-19 vaccine during pregnancy found no evidence of injury, adding to the growing evidence that COVID-19 vaccines are safe in pregnancy. “The placenta is like the black box in an airplane. If something goes wrong with a pregnancy, we usually see changes in the placenta that can help us figure out what happened. From what we can tell, the COVID vaccine does not damage the placenta,” said corresponding author Dr. Jeffery Goldstein, Northwestern Medicine pathologist. The study’s co-author Dr. Emily Miller, Northwestern Medicine maternal fetal medicine physician stated, “We have reached a stage in vaccine distribution where we are seeing vaccine hesitancy, and this hesitancy is pronounced for pregnant people,” said. “Our team hopes these data, albeit preliminary, can reduce concerns about the risk of the vaccine to the pregnancy … Until infants can get vaccinated, the only way for them to get COVID antibodies is from their mother.” Dr. Miller is now Chief of Obstetrics for Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

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May 12, 1777 – Mary B. Reibey born in England, transported to Australia at age 14 under the name James Burrow, because she ran away from service disguised as a boy, on a stolen horse. At 17, she married Thomas Reibey, who had served as a junior officer aboard the ship that took her Australia, and they farmed land he was granted on the Hawkesbury River, then started a cargo business on the river, acquired more land, and Thomas went into partnership in a trading business; when he died in 1811, Mary took over all the enterprises while continuing to raise their seven children; she expanded her business interests, and helped found the Bank of New South Wales; to further her ambitions for her daughters, she took them to England in 1820, returning the following year; so in the 1828 census, she listed her status as “came free in 1821.” She gradually went into semi-retirement, undertaking additional charitable works, and serving as one of the Governors of the Free Grammar School. She is featured on the obverse side of the Australian 20 dollar bill.

May 12, 1820 – Florence Nightingale born, English nurse, social reformer, and statistician; considered the founder of modern nursing, she was known as “The Lady with the Lamp” during the Crimean War. She instituted sanitation procedures which greatly improved the survival rate of the sick and wounded; after the war, she was director of the Nightingale Training School at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London. Her book, Notes on Nursing, was widely read, and was the first book on nursing which covered what are now standard sanitary practices. Nightingale was also a pioneer in data visualization with the use of infographics, effectively using graphical presentations of statistical data, in particular in illustrating causes of army deaths over time during the war. She greatly improved the public perception of nursing, and did much to make it a “respectable” profession for women. She introduced trained nurses into the British workhouse system. Previously, more able-bodied paupers did what little they could to ease the suffering of those who fell ill in the harsh conditions. By 1882, Nightingale nurses had become matrons at several leading hospitals, and in 1883, Nightingale was the first recipient of the Royal Red Cross. In 1907, she was the first woman to be awarded the Order of Merit.

The International Red Cross
Florence Nightingale Medal

May 12, 1849 – Matilda Coxe Stevenson born, American ethnologist, a major contributors to her field; at the Bureau of American Ethnology, she was an expert in the Zuni religion, domestic life, and the duties and rituals of Zuni women in particular, and one of the first ethnologists to study the lives of children. Stevenson was the Women’s Anthropological Society of America’s first president (1885-1888). Author of The Zuñi Indians: Their Mythology, Esoteric Fraternities, and Ceremonies.

May 12, 1899 – Indra Devi born as Eugenie Peterson in the Russian Empire; in 1917, she and her mother, a Russian noble, escaped to Berlin as the Bolsheviks came to power. In Germany, she was an actress and dancer, but was fascinated for years by India and yoga. In 1927, she sailed for India and adopted her stage name. In 1930, she married Jan Strakaty, an attaché in the Czechoslovak consulate. She was eventually accepted as a student by the famed Yoga guru Sri Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, and in 1938 she became the first foreign women among the dedicated yogi. When she told the guru that her husband was being transferred to China, he asked her to work there as a yoga teacher. In 1939, she held what are considered the first Yoga classes in China, and opened a school in Shanghai with help from Madame Chiang Kai-shek. She also had many American and Russian students. She gave lectures on yoga and free lessons in orphanages. After her husband died unexpectedly in 1946, she moved the following year to the U.S., then opened a yoga studio in Hollywood in 1948. Among her students were Greta Garbo, Eva Gabor, Gloria Swanson, Robert Ryan, Jennifer Jones, and the violinist Yehudi Menuhin. In 1961, she opened the Indra Devi Foundation in Tecate, México, where she trained yoga instructors. In 1985, she moved to Argentina, and died in Buenos Aires at age 102 in 2002.

May 12, 1900 – Mildred H. McAfee born, American educator and the first director of the WAVES in the United States Navy during WWII. She was dean of women at Centre College and Oberlin College, and president of Wellesley College. In 1950, she became a vice-president at large of the National Council of Churches. She was an advocate for the ordination of women.

May 12, 1903 – Faith Bennett born as Margaret Riddick, British film actress and WWII ATA pilot; while working in motion pictures in the 1930s, she took flying lessons and earned both a British aviator’s certificate and an American flying license; she joined the Air Transport Auxiliary, a civilian group that ferried new, repaired, and damaged military aircraft, and ferried service personnel; in 1943, the women began to receive the same pay as the male ATA pilots, a first for the British government; after she was injured in a crash landing made in bad weather with a stalled engine, she was assigned to the Training Ferry Pool, and remained with the ATA until July 1945. The British Women Pilots’ Association, formed in 1955, awards the Faith Bennett Navigation Cup for special merit during a challenging navigation exercise.

**Faith Bennett,** Air Transport Auxiliary pilot, writing in her log

May 12, 1907 – Katharine Hepburn born, American movie star, a stage, film and television actress whose career spanned over 60 years, but who was fiercely protective of her life off-camera. During the McCarthy era, she joined the Committee for the First Amendment, and firmly denied being a Communist sympathizer; politically a Democrat, she supported birth control, abortion rights, Planned Parenthood, and separation of church and state. After she announced publicly she was an atheist, she received the 1985 Humanist Arts Award from the American Humanist Association. Hepburn was nominated 12 times for Best Actress Oscars, and won for Morning Glory, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, The Lion in Winter (tied with Barbra Streisand), and On Golden Pond.

May 12, 1910 – Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin born in Cairo, British biochemist and X-ray crystallographer. She won the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for her determinations by X-ray techniques of the structures of important biochemical substances.” She is the only British woman scientist to have been awarded a Nobel Prize in the sciences. Hodgkin improved X-ray crystallography, confirmed the structure of penicillin, and discovered the structure of vitamin B12 and insulin. Her achievements included not only these structure determinations and the scientific insight they provided, but also the development of methods that made such structure determinations possible. In 1946, she took part in the meetings which led to the foundation of the International Union of Crystallography, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1947.

May 12, 1926 – Paulette Poujol-Oriol born, Haitian author, dramaturge, actress, and feminist. She was fluent in French, Creole, English, Spanish, German, and Italian. Her family moved to Paris when she was an infant, then returned to Haiti when she was six. She founded the Piccolo Teatro, to teach drama to children; Poujol-Oriol was president of the Ligue Féminine d’Action Social (Feminine League for Social Action) from 1997 until her death in 2011, and she was also a founding member of the Club des femmes de carrière libérale et commerciale (Liberal and Commercial Career Women’s Club) in 1994, and of the Alliance des Femmes Haïtiennes, an umbrella body coordinating the work of fifty feminist organizations; author of the novel Le creuset (The Crucible), which won the 1980 Prix Littéraire Henri Deschamps. She was the second woman to win the award.

May 12, 1928 – Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini ended women’s rights in Italy; he rescinded women’s suffrage, restricting the right to vote only to men aged 21 and over, who would have to pay a tax of 100 lire for the privilege, no small amount then. Mussolini was overthrown in 1943, plunging the country into civil war. Thousands of Italian women joined the fight against the fractured fascist government, which was propped up by Nazi forces occupying Italy.

Italian women fighting to liberate Milan in 1945

May 12, 1937 – Miriam Stern Stoppard born, Lady Hogg, English physician, author, television presenter on medical and science programmes, and columnist for the Daily Mirror newspaper. She was born into an Orthodox Jewish family, and grew up on a council housing estate (British public housing). As a teenager, she attended the Central High School in Eskdale Terrace on a scholarship, then trained as a nurse at Newcastle General Hospital. She then studied medicine at King’s College, Durham. After qualifying as a doctor, she worked as a dermatologist, and became a senior registrar (senior resident) at Bristol Royal Infirmary, then switched to research at the Syntex pharmaceutical laboratories, where she was promoted to managing director. Author of several advice books on pregnancy, parenting, and healthcare for children. After her divorce from playwright Tom Stoppard, she married industrialist Sir Christopher Hogg, but has kept the name Stoppard professionally.

May 12, 1949 –Ambassador Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit of India becomes the first woman ambassador to be received in Washington DC.

May 12, 1950 – Helena Kennedy born, Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws, Scottish barrister, Labor member of the House of Lords (Life Peer since 1997). Rebelled against the party whip more frequently than any other Labour Peer. Chancellor of Sheffield Hallam University since 2018; formerly, she was principal of Mansfield College, Oxford (2011-2018).

May 12, 1967 – Mireille Bousquet-Mélou born, French mathematician, specialist in enumerative combinatorics, and senior researcher for the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS – French National Center for Scientific Research) at the computer science department (LaBRI) of the University of Bordeaux. She won the French Academy of Sciences’ Charles-Louis de Saulces de Freycinet Prize in 2009, and the silver medal of the CNRS in 2014.

May 12, 1968 – A 12-block long Mother’s Day March of “welfare mothers” is held in Washington, D.C., led by Coretta Scott King accompanied by Ethel Kennedy.

CorettaScottKingandEthelKennedy.-68MothersDayMarch.jpg

May 12, 1977 – Maryam Mirzakhani born, Iranian mathematician and professor of mathematics at Stanford University. Her research work included Teichmüller theory, hyperbolic geometry, ergodic theory, and symplectic geometry. In 2014, she was honored with the Fields Medal, the first woman and first Iranian to receive the most prestigious award in mathematics, for her work in “the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces.” In 2013, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, which spread to her bones and liver by 2016. She died in 2017 at age 40. Memorials by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and in Iranian newspapers broke taboo by including pictures of her with her hair uncovered. Her death has also renewed debates within Iran regarding matrilineal citizenship for children of mixed-nationality parentage; Fars News Agency reported that 60 Iranian MPs urged the speeding up of an amendment to a law that would allow children of Iranian mothers married to foreigners to be given Iranian nationality, in order to make it easier for Mirzakhani’s daughter to visit Iran. The Women’s Committee within the Iranian Mathematical Society campaigned successfully for the International Council for Science to declare Mirzakhani’s birthday as International Women in Mathematics Day.

May 12, 2018 – A report by Prison Policy Initiative researchers Wendy Sawyer and Wanda Bertram, in collaboration with the ACLU’s Campaign for Smart Justice, show there are 231,000 women locked up in the U.S. While this represents just 10% of the total prison population, in many states the incarceration rate of women is growing faster than the men’s, especially in local jails. 101,000 women are locked up in local jails, and over 60,000 of them have not yet been convicted of a crime. Property and drug-related crimes are the most common, but public order arrests have been increasing. Of the 99,000 women serving time in state prisons, over 37,000 of them have been convicted of violent crimes, followed by about 26,000 for property crimes and over 24,000 for drug crimes. There are 16,000 women in the Federal prisons and jails, over 12,000 of them for drug-related offenses.

May 12, 2021 – The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the nomination of Tiffany Cunningham to the U.S. Court of Appeal for the Federal District. Cunningham, a registered patent attorney before the U.S. Patent and Trademark office, with over 20 years of experience in patent and intellectual property law, also holds a B.S. in Chemical Engineering and a law degree. She assumed office on August 6, 2021. Her combined knowledge of engineering and patent and intellectual property law brought a critical perspective to a court that deals with issues of technology, science, and medicine.

TiffanyCunningham-U.S.CourtofAppealfortheFederalDistrict.jpg

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May 13, 1254 – Marie of Brabant born, Queen consort of France (1274-1285) as the second wife of King Philip III. She is notable for her part in the peace negotiations in 1294 between England and France, during the reign of her stepson, Philip IV.

May 13, 1373 – English anchoress Julian of Norwich has visions which are later transcribed in her Revelations of Divine Love (circa 1395), the first book in English known to be written by a woman.

May 13, 1717 – Maria Theresa born, only woman to rule over the Habsburg dominions, and the last of the House of Habsburg. Her father, Emperor Charles VI, paved the way for her succession with the Pragmatic Sanction of 1723, bypassing the prevailing Salic law, which precluded female inheritance. Her ascension to the throne after her father’s death in 1740 caused an immediate invasion by Frederick II of Prussia, who took the affluent Habsburg province of Silesia, but Maria Theresa managed to secure the support of the Hungarians and held him off. Meanwhile, Saxony, Prussia, Bavaria, and France all repudiated their recognition of the Pragmatic Sanction which they had agreed to during her father’s lifetime, and the War of the Austrian Succession began. She was crowned Holy Roman Empress in 1745, and reigned until her death in 1780.

Empress Maria Theresa (1759) — by Martin van Meytens

May 13, 1847 – Linda Gilbert born, American prison reformer; her family home was opposite the Cook County jail in Chicago. When she was 11, she gave some books to prisoners at the jail. She spent most of an inheritance on philanthropy, incorporated the Gilbert Library and Prisoners’ Aid Society, and succeeded in placing libraries in 22 prisons in six states. She also procured employment for 6,000 ex-convicts.

May 13, 1850 – Ellen Spencer Mussey born, lawyer, educator, and women’s rights advocate. With Emma Gillett, she opened the first ‘Woman’s Law Class’ (1896). They began with three students, but the program quickly expanded, with several prominent Washington D.C. attorneys providing assistance. When Columbian College refused a request by Mussey and Gillett to take on the women they had educated for their final year of education — on grounds that “women did not have the mentality for law” — they established a co-educational law school specifically open to women (1898), the Washington College of Law, the first law school in the world founded by women. Mussey and Gillett also founded the Women’s Bar Association of the District of Columbia in 1917.

May 13, 1859 – Kate Marsden born, British missionary, explorer, writer, and nurse. She became a nurse at 16, and later was matron at Wellington Hospital. She went with other nurses to Bulgaria in 1877 to nurse Russian soldiers during Russia’s war with Turkey, and was given an award by Empress Maria Fedorovna for her devotion to her patients. It was here that she first encountered lepers. She and her mother traveled to New Zealand when her sister became ill, but arrived just days before she died. Marsden set up a St. John’s Ambulance group and gave ambulance lectures while she was there. Wanting to treat leprosy, she obtained help from Queen Victoria and the Russian Royal family, and traveled to Egypt, Palestine, Cyprus, and Turkey. In Constantinople (now Istanbul), she met a British doctor who told her about the curative properties of an herb found in Siberia. She next went to Moscow, where she obtained a letter of introduction from the Tsarina, and began an 11,000-mile round trip from Moscow to Siberia seeking the herb, with her assistant and translator, Ada Field. They found the herb, but it was not the cure for leprosy she had hoped. She did set up a leper treatment centre in Siberia. When she returned to England, she faced derision, disbelief in her journey, questions about her finances, and accusations of “immoral behavior” with other women. Marsden was one of the founders of the Bexhill Museum, but was forced to resign before the museum opened in 1914 because the Mayor of Bexhill contacted the museum’s committee and revealed the controversies about her. She died in 1931, suffering from dropsy and ‘senile decay.’

May 13, 1887 – Lorna Hodgkinson born, Australian educational psychologist who worked with ‘intellectually disabled’ children; first woman to receive a Doctor of Education degree from Harvard University – her thesis was entitled A State Program for the Diagnosis and Treatment of Atypical Children in Public School Systems. She was appointed as the first Superintendent of the Education of Mental Defectives for the New South Wales Department of Education, but her testimony before the Royal Commission on Lunacy Law and Administration that the care for intellectually disabled children was mismanaged sparked public protests and a ministerial inquiry. The inquiry members accused her of falsifying her educational record to gain admission to Harvard, which resulted in her suspension for “disgraceful and improper conduct in making false statements and pretences (sic)”, and she was demoted. She refused to take the new position and was dismissed. The dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education then wrote a statement confirming her abilities and achievements. She founded the Sunshine Institute in 1924, a residential school for intellectually disabled children in Sydney, and ran the school until her death in 1951. She also gave lectures on mental hygiene on the radio.

May 13, 1888 – Lei Áurea (golden law), abolishing all slavery in Brazil, is signed by Isabel, Princess Imperial of Brazil (1846–1921), an opponent of slavery, while she is acting as regent to Emperor Dom Pedro II; previous laws had freed all children born to slave parents, and all slaves who reached the age of 60.

May 13, 1888 – Inge Lehmann born, first Danish seismologist and geophysicist, and the first true geophysicist in the world. In her 1936 paper “P” (for Prime), she identified the Lehmann Discontinuity, now named for her, in the seismic structure of the earth, which marks a previously unknown boundary at the solid inner core of the Earth. Based on her interpretation of worldwide shock wave records from a large earthquake near New Zealand in 1929, she continued to add to the knowledge of the earth’s internal structure by studying the body-wave amplitudes and travel times of seismic waves in the upper mantle. She proved the Earth’s inner core was solid, but surrounded by a molten outer core, and made advances in the understanding of seismic waves during earthquakes.

May 13, 1907 – Daphne du Maurier born, British novelist, short story writer, and playwright; she is best known for her novels Rebecca and Jamaica Inn.

May 13, 1914 – Antonia Ferrín Moreiras born in Galicia, an autonomous community in Spain; mathematician, professor, and the first Galician woman astronomer; worked on stellar occulations by the moon and measurements, including those of double stars; in 1963, she was the first Spanish woman to defend an astronomy thesis, Observaciones de pasos por dos verticales (Observations of passages of stars through two verticals).

May 13, 1918 – Balasaraswati born, celebrated Indian dancer in the ancient classical Southern Indian dance form Bharatanatyam, a folk art-form which combines music and dance. Her family has been described as the greatest single repository of the traditional performing arts of music and dance of India’s southern region. She toured all over the world, and was a resident teacher at several U.S. universities and dance festivals, launching a revival of Bharatanatyam at home, and garnering international attention, including winning praise from legendary Western tradition dancers Margot Fonteyn, Martha Graham, and Merce Cunningham.

May 13, 1920 – Ernesta Drinker Ballard born, American horticulturist and feminist; one of the founders of the National Organization for Women, the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, and Women’s Way, a nonprofit in Philadelphia which advocates for public policy to address women’s issues. Ballard was the executive director of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (1963-1981). She was raised by a father who constantly reinforced the idea that women were inferior to men, and only valuable as wives and mothers. She went to a finishing school instead of college, and married in 1939 at age 19, then devoted herself to her husband and four children. When her mother rebelled late in life and became a feminist, it caused a breach in their relationship, but Ballard herself grew tired of just being somebody’s wife and somebody’s mother, and went back to school. In 1954, she graduated from the Pennsylvania School of Horticulture for Women (now part of Temple University), and started her own business, Valley Gardens. She wrote The Art of Training Plants and Garden in Your House. In 1964, Ballard closed Valley Gardens to become the director of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. The Philadelphia Flower Show was so poorly run that it was about to be canceled. Ballard persuaded the Horticultural Society’s board to stage the show in 1965; by 1968, the society was the show’s official producer, and under her leadership, it grew to be one of the largest indoor flower shows in the U.S. As proceeds from the Flower Show grew, Ballard started the Horticultural Society’s community gardening program, Philadelphia Green, which became one of the largest urban greening programs in the U.S. In 2000, she won the Philadelphia Award for her work as a horticulturist and feminist. Ballard died in 2005 at age 85.

May 13, 1923 – Ruth Adler Schnee born in Germany; her Jewish family fled Germany in 1938; American textile and interior designer, a pioneer in modern abstract textile design.

May 13, 1948 – Sheila Jeffreys born in England, Australian professor of political science at the University of Melbourne until her retirement in 2015; radical lesbian feminist and author; The Spinster and Her Enemies; Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution; and The Industrial Vagina: The Political Economy of the Global Sex Trade.

May 13, 1951 – Sharon Sayles Belton born, African American community and civil rights activist, Democratic politician; senior fellow at the Roy Wilkins Center for Human Relations and Social Justice (2001-2006); first woman and first African American mayor of Minneapolis (1994-2001); City Council President (1990-1993), City Council member (1983-1993); co-founder in 1978 of the Harriet Tubman Shelter for Battered Women, and a founding member in 2000 of the National Coalition Against Sexual Assault.

May 13, 1951 – Rosie Boycott born, British journalist and feminist; co-founder of the feminist magazine Spare Rib, and one of the directors of Virago Press. She is also a presenter for the BBC Radio 4 programme A Good Read.

May 13, 1952 – Londa Schiebinger born, American academic; John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science at Stanford University; international authority on the theory, practice, and history of gender in science; currently Director of the Gendered Innovations in Science, Medicine, Engineering, and Environment Project; member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; author of Has Feminism Changed Science?

May 13, 1952 – Mary Walsh born, Canadian comedian, actress, writer, and director; best known as the creator and co-star of This Hour Has 22 Minutes, a parody of the nightly news and Canadian politics which has been on the air since 1993. She published her debut novel, Crying for the Moon, in 2017, and made her feature film directorial debut with the 2007 comedic film Young Triffie. She suffers from macular degeneration, and has served as a spokesperson for the Canadian Institute for the Blind.

May 13, 1953 – Ruth A. David born, American electrical engineer; while working at the CIA, she reorganized the agency’s intelligence technology system, and designed a proposal to procure technology during the development stage from the private sector; she was awarded the National Security Agency Distinguished Service Medal.

May 13, 1986 – Lena Dunham born, American writer, actress, and producer-director; best known for creating, writing, and starring in the HBO series Girls. She also directed several episodes. In 2012, she was the first woman to win a Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing– Comedy Series.

May 13, 2019 – The American Psychological Association, the largest U.S. scientific and professional organization representing psychology, issued “Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Girls and Women” – an update of their guidelines issued in 2007. “An emphasis on resilience is embedded throughout many of the guidelines. It’s important for psychologists to recognize this so they don’t over-diagnose or pathologize the problems of girls and women,” said Lillian Comas-Diaz, PhD, clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. The guidelines acknowledge that women and girls face many challenges, from discrimination in the workplace, to lack of access to parental leave and affordable childcare, and continuing high rates of sexual violence and sexual harassment. They urge psychologists to be aware that girls and women form their identities in contexts with multiple, contradictory, and changing messages about “what it means to be female.”

May 13, 2021 – Ten years after the launch of the Istanbul Convention, the landmark human rights treaty to stop gender-based violence, women are facing a global assault on their rights and safety, according to campaigners. Despite 46 countries signing the treaty, the world has become gripped by “a pandemic of violence against women,” exacerbated and exposed by Covid-19, according to Dubravka Šimonović, UN special rapporteur on violence against women, “The Covid pandemic revealed what was happening before. We have a pandemic of violence against women that was not addressed properly in a huge number of states.” The rise in violence against women and girls has been mirrored by a political backlash against the convention – the first international legally binding framework to prevent domestic violence, protect survivors, and promote equality. In March, 2021, Turkey, the birthplace of the convention, announced it would be pulling out of the treaty in July, in spite of widespread domestic and international condemnation. Turkey’s withdrawal from the convention reflects years of escalating anti-feminist, anti-women, and anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric by its politicians, including President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has publicly and repeatedly stated that he does not believe in equality between men and women. His government has also increasingly linked women’s safety to remaining at home with their families and having more children. “We lost a safety net,” said Elif Ege, of the women’s refuge organisation Mor Çati in Istanbul. “The Istanbul convention was not implemented properly at all over the years … but it doesn’t mean it was completely ineffective; it was a significant tool in the hands of feminist organisations.”

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May 14, 1761 – Adelaide Filleul born, Marquise de Souza-Botelho, French novelist and salonnière; she fled France in 1792, but her husband was arrested and guillotined during the Reign of Terror. She joined a group of émigrés in England, and supported herself by writing novels; Adèle de Sénanges is her best-known work. She moved to Switzerland, then to Germany, where she earned her living as a milliner, before returning to Paris in 1798. In 1802, she married Dom José Maria de Sousa Botelho Mourão e Vasconcelos, the Portuguese minister plenipotentiary. She died at age 75 in 1836.

May 14, 1878 – Mary Wilhelmine Williams born, American historian, educator, feminist, and pacifist; Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom member, and founder of the California chapter of the National Women’s Party. She specialized in Latin American history, and was honored for her work in promoting understanding between countries.

May 14, 1890 – Margaret Naumberg born, American psychologist, progressive educator, artist, and author; founded the Walden School in New York. A pioneer of art therapy who developed Dynamically Oriented Art Therapy.

May 14, 1899 – Charlotte Auerbach born, German-Jewish geneticist who worked in primarily in Scotland, a pioneer in the science of mutagenesis, a process that changes the genetic information of an organism, causing a mutation, which can occur naturally, or due to exposure a mutagen, such as radiation or harmful chemicals; co-discoverer with A. J. Clark and J. M. Robson that mustard gas could cause mutations in fruit flies. She wrote 91 scientific papers. Auerbach was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1949) and of the Royal Society of London (1957). In 1976, she was awarded the Royal Society’s Darwin Medal.

May 14, 1900 – Cai Chang born, Chinese politician and women’s rights activist; first chair of the All-China Women’s Federation, a women’s rights group founded in 1949. She began to work for the Central Women’s Department in the Nationalist Party in 1925, and in 1927 joined the Central Women’s Committee, and contributed to the Marriage Decree of 1930, which declared that “free choice must be the basic principle of every marriage.” She also helped write the Provisional Constitution of 1931. From 1934–1935, she joined her husband Li Fuchun on the Long March.

May 14, 1902 – Helen Flanders Dunbar born, American doctor and pioneering psychobiologist, important early figure in U.S. psychosomatic medicine; advocate of cooperation between physicians and clergy in treating the sick, as part of a holistic approach to treatment of patients. She was the first medical director (1930-1942) of the Council for the Clinical Training of Theological Students in New York City. Dunbar was also the director of the Joint Committee on Religion and Medicine of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, and of the New York Academy of Medicine (1931-1936).

May 14, 1921 – Florence Ellinwood Allen becomes the first woman judge to sentence a man to death, gangster Frank Motto, who was convicted in Ohio of murdering two men during a robbery. Allen went on to be the first woman to serve on a state supreme court, and one of the first two women appointed as U.S. federal judges.

May 14, 1924 – Sonya Butt born, British Women’s Auxiliary Air Force Aircraftwoman (1941-1943), and Special Operations Executive (SOE) courier. One of the youngest SOE recruits, she was just 19 when she began her specialist training in December 1943. In May 1944, she was one of the last SOE women parachuted into France before D-Day, near Le Mans. She worked as a courier for the Headmaster network. Butt carried money, passed messages, and kept in contact with the Maquis, SOE agents, and local operatives. In June 1944, while delivering messages, she was stopped by two Germans and detained for questioning, but her cover story and false papers withstood the examination, and she was released. After the district that Headmaster was operating in was liberated, she returned to England in October, 1944. Still just 20 years old, she was mentioned in dispatches for her bravery and her work. After the war, she was awarded an MBE.

May 14, 1925 – Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway is published.

May 14, 1939 – Lina Medina de Jurado of Peru becomes the youngest confirmed mother in medical history, giving birth by caesarean section at age five years, seven months and 21 days, to a son. She never revealed the circumstances of her impregnation, or the identity of the father of her child.

May 14, 1946 – Sarah Hogg born, Viscountess Hailsham, Baroness Hogg; English economist, journalist, and life peer since 1995, sitting as a crossbencher in the House of Lords; first woman to chair a FTSE (Financial Times Stock Exchange) 100 company, the 3i Group, since 2002.

May 14, 1952 – Orna Grumberg born, Israeli computer scientist and academic; Leumi Chair of Science at the Technion; developer of model checking, a method for formally verifying properties of hardware and software designs; named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2015.

May 14, 1958 – Christine Brennan born, sports reporter, columnist, and advocate for women in sports journalism; first woman sports reporter for the Miami Herald (1981); first woman on the Washington Redskins beat for the Washington Post (1985); first president of the Association for Women in Sports Media (1988), and developer of AWSM’s scholarship-inter program for female journalism students. Author of The Miracle of Miami, and the best-seller Inside Edge; public speaker on the importance of Title IX and the scourge of performance-enhancing drugs. Her columns in USA Today sparked a national debate on the men-only membership of Augusta National Golf Club.

May 14, 1966 – Natalie M. Batalha born, astrophysicist, stellar spectroscopist, professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, and associated with NASA’s Ames Research Center team which identified viable planets from the Kepler telescope mission data. She led the analysis that yielded the discovery in 2011 of Kepler 10b, the first confirmed rocky planet outside our solar system. In 2017, she was awarded Smithsonian Magazine’s American Ingenuity Award in Physical Sciences, and in 2019, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

May 14, 1969 – Contraception and limited access to abortion are legalized in Canada. Chief Coroner of Ontario Morton Shulman: “By the time I became Chief Coroner, I had had the unpleasant experience of seeing the bodies of some dozens of young women who had died as a result of these amateur abortions.” He decided to publicize deaths from illegal abortions. He instructed his coroners to call a public inquest into each abortion death. Morton described one case that he believed was the turning point, that of 34-year-old Lottie Leanne Clarke, a mother of three children, who died of a massive infection in 1964 after an illegal abortion, in spite of medical treatment and antibiotics. At the inquest into her death, the jury recommended that the laws about therapeutic abortion be revised. Dr. Shulman advocated for a federal government committee to review the question of abortion and the law. Newspapers published editorials recommending the reform of the abortion law. McGill University students in 1968 produced the Birth Control Handbook — a criminal offense at the time. Such information was nearly impossible to find, so copies of their Birth Control Handbook were distributed by the millions, as requests poured in from across Canada and the U.S. “We joked that after the Bible, we were probably one of the most widely distributed publications in Canada,” recalls Donna Cherniak, one of the handbook’s two original authors. The book went through 12 editions between 1968 and 1975. In 1965, the Minister of Justice, Guy Favreau, wrote to Dr. Shulman that the recommendations would be considered in the program to amend the Criminal Code. The amendment which was finally passed closely followed the recommendations of the coroners’ juries.

May 14, 1969 – Cate Blanchett born, Australian stage and film actress, producer, and environmental activist; winner of the 2005 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in The Aviator, and the 2013 Best Actress Oscar for her performance in Blue Jasmine. From 2008 to 2011, she was co-artistic director of the Sydney Theatre Company, and also performed in its productions of A Streetcar Named Desire, Uncle Vanya, and The Present, which transferred to Broadway in 2017, where she was nominated for a Best Actress Tony Award. Blanchett has been a long-term proponent of individual and collective action on climate change and other environmental issues. In 2007, Blanchett became the ambassador for the Australian Conservation Foundation. In 2011, Blanchett lent her support for a carbon tax. She is also a patron of the international development charity SolarAid, which works to create a sustainable market for solar lights in Africa. Since 2020, she has been a council member for the Earthshot Prize, which provides environmental pioneers with the funds needed to further their work. In May 2016, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees announced her appointment as a global Goodwill Ambassador. In July 2020, the Australian miniseries Stateless, co-created and produced by Blanchett, premiered on Netflix.

May 14, 1986 – The Netherlands Institute for War Documentation publishes Anne Frank’s complete diary.

May 14, 2013 – Brazil becomes the fifteenth country to legalize same-sex marriage.

May 14, 2019 – Women’s Rights Advocates and Progressive Groups joined forces in a plea to media organizations covering the 2020 presidential primaries to practice unbiased reporting of every presidential hopeful, and provide fair, accurate, and equal attention to every candidate to end sexist or racist bias in reporting. The letter was sent to executives at MSNBC, CNN, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, Fox News, Univision, Telemundo, and PBS. UltraViolet Action, a leading U.S. women’s advocacy group, brought together Above All Action Fund, Color of Change, CREDO, EMILY’s List, Feminist Majority Foundation, Girls for Gender Equity, Global Justice Center, MoveOn Political Action, NARAL, National Domestic Workers Alliance, National Partnership for Women & Families, National Women’s Law Center Action Fund, National Women’s Health Network, NextGen America, Not Without Black Women, Pantsuit Nation, Positive Women’s Network-USA, She The People, Progressive Change Campaign Committee, United We Dream Action, Way to Win, Women’s March, and National Domestic Workers Alliance as signers on the letter. UltraViolet’s letter was written following the absence of women moderators on CNN’s April 22 town hall, where CNN held question-and-answer sessions with five of 2020 Democratic contenders: Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Senators Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders. At that town hall, only the women presidential candidates were asked questions about sexism, including questions about gender pay gap, messages to young women voters, and what could be done to “level the playing field and empower working women.”

May 14, 2020 – A video went viral showing New York City police officers tackling an African American woman and handcuffing her in front of her young child in a Brooklyn subway station, after she allegedly failed to wear a mask properly, and also charged her with resisting arrest, and disorderly conduct. The Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office reported that of 40 people arrested by NYPD for social distancing and mask violations, 35 were Black, four were Hispanic or Latino, and just one was white.

May 14, 2021 – In Ethiopia, an eyewitness says that Eritrean and Ethiopian troops fighting the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, are using rape as a weapon of war against thousands of women and girls. In the isolated region of Tigray in northern Ethiopia, where communications with the outside world have been deliberately cut off, an Ethiopian nun spoke of the widespread horror she and her colleagues see on a daily basis since a savage civil war erupted six months ago. “Rape is starting at the age of 8 and to the age of 72. Many, many have been raped. This has all happened so quickly,” said the nun, who cannot be named to protect her security because she still works in the region. “It is so widespread, I go on seeing it everywhere, thousands. This rape is in public, in front of family, husbands, in front of everyone. Their legs and their hands are cut, all in the same way … [Rape is happening] wherever there are Eritrean or Ethiopian troops. Tragic. Every single woman. Not only once. It is intentional; it is deliberate. I am confident in that from what I am witnessing. Some 70,000 civilians are under attack. So much looting, fighting, raping. All targeting the civilians. The brutality, the killings, the harassing … I would like to say to the world: they must not wait for another second. Everybody in the world must act, must condemn this.” The conflict also plunged the region even further into severe food insecurity, and a deliberate military blockade of food risks mass starvation, a report by the World Peace Foundation warned. At least 5.2 million people are in need of food aid. The UN confirmed that military forces have been impeding humanitarian access to parts of Tigray, and there have been reports of military forces from Eritrea working with Ethiopians to cut off critical aid routes. Laetitia Bader, director for the Horn of Africa at Human Rights Watch, said the communications shutdown across the region was hampering efforts to document what was happening in Tigray. “Since the beginning of this conflict, the warring parties have gone out of their way to make it extremely difficult to document the human rights abuses and humanitarian situation in real time. In the last three weeks, with the internet shutdown, it has become impossible.”

Rahel-rapesurvivorinTigraycivilwar-HRWLaetitiaBader.jpg — Tigray rape survivor — **Laetitia Bader, Human Rights Watch**

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May 15, 1536 – Anne Boleyn, Queen consort of England, stands trial in London on charges of high treason, adultery, witchcraft, and incest. Henry VIII claimed she “bewitched him,” and she was accused of having sex with her brother and three other men. She was condemned to death by a specially-selected jury. Anne Boleyn was executed on May 19, 1536. King Henry married Jane Seymour May 30, 1536.

May 15, 1759 – Maria Theresia von Paradis born, Austrian musician and composer, lost her sight before age five. By 16, she was performing as a singer and pianist in Viennese salons and concerts, having committed by ear dozens of concertos, solos, and other works to memory; she wrote five operas, three cantatas, and numerous solo pieces for piano and voice. Also founded a music school for girls in Vienna (1808-1824).

May 15, 1857 – Williamina Paton Stevens Fleming born, Scottish astronomer, a pioneer in cataloguing and classification of stellar spectra; catalogued over 10,000 stars. She was the first to discover stars she named “white dwarfs,” and also discovered the Horsehead Nebula. Edward Pickering, the director of the Harvard Observatory, put her in charge of the women known as the Harvard “computers.” In 1899, Harvard recognized her contributions, and her official position became Curator of Astronomical Photographs. In 1906, she became an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society of London, and soon after, was appointed honorary Fellow in Astronomy of Wellesley College.

May 15, 1869 – In New York, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton form the National Woman Suffrage Association.

May 15, 1890 – Katherine Anne Porter born, American journalist, author, and leftist political activist. She won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and the National Book Award, for The Collected Stories in 1965; best known for her novel Ship of Fools.

May 15, 1900 – Ida Rhodes born in Ukraine as Hadassah Itzkowitz. She came to America at 13 with her family; mathematician who joined the Mathematical Tables Project in 1940, working under Gertrude Blanch as a pioneer in the analysis of programming systems; co-designer with Betty Holberton of the C-10 programming language for UNIVAC; awarded a Gold Medal by the Department of Commerce for “significant pioneering leadership and outstanding contributions to the scientific progress of the Nation in the functional design and the application of electronic digital computing equipment.” After she retired in 1964, she continued to consult for the Applied Mathematics Division of the National Bureau of Standards, traveling and lecturing; she created “the Jewish Holiday” algorithm still used in calendar programs today.

May 15, 1901 – Dorothy Hansine Andersen born, American physician and educator, first person to identify cystic fibrosis as a disease, first American physician to describe it, and worked on creating a test to diagnose it. In 1958, she became chief of pathology at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital and a full professor of pathology at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. Inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2002.

May 15, 1903 – Maria Reiche born, German mathematician and archaeologist; known for research on the Nazca Lines in Peru, her life’s work for 50 years. She worked tirelessly to gain recognition for the site, and Peru’s protection of them, as well as Nazca’s classification as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995.

May 15, 1915 – Hilda Bernstein born in Britain, South African author, artist, and activist against apartheid and for women’s rights; a founding member of the multi-racial Federation of South African Women, and one of the organizers of the Women’s March to Pretoria in 1956. By 1958, she was banned from writing or publishing, and in 1960 was working entirely undercover; in 1963, after her husband was arrested, acquitted, and then re-arrested, and put under house arrest awaiting another trial, she and her husband fled from South Africa on foot to Botswana, an ordeal described in her book The World that was Ours. They went into exile in England where they continued to advocate for the African National Congress, and an end to apartheid. They returned to South Africa for the 1994 election in which Nelson Mandela was voted into office as President.

May 15, 1916 – Catherine East born, American feminist, worker for the Civil Service Commission, and member of the first Presidential Advisory Commission on the Status of Women; used her access to official data to disprove claims by opponents of feminist-advocated legislation, and helped reconcile differences between labor activists and feminists; Legislative Director of the National Women’s Political Caucus; Betty Friedan called her “the midwife of the contemporary women’s movement.”

May 15, 1924 – Maria Koepcke born, German-born Peruvian ornithologist and zoologist; noted for her work with Neotropical bird species; four species of birds are named in her honor. She was killed in a plane crash in 1971 at the age of 47. Her 17-year-old daughter Juliane, the only survivor of the crash, though injured and without food, hiked through the rainforest for 11 days before she reached help. She became a mammalogist, and studies bats.

May 15, 1925 – Mary F. Lyon born, English geneticist who discovered the X-chromosome inactivation, which prevents females from having twice as many X chromosome gene products as males. For example in tortoiseshell and calico cats, for any given patch of fur the inactivation of an X chromosome that carries one gene results in the fur color being that of the other, active gene.

May 15, 1930 – Grace Ogot born, Kenyan nurse, author, journalist, politician, and diplomat; delegate to the United Nations and UNESCO; helped found the Writers’ Association of Kenya; Member of Parliament and cabinet minister; writes in both English and her native language of Luo. Noted for The Promised Land, and Land Without Thunder.

May 15, 1936 – Amy Johnson arrives in England after her record flight of twelve days and fifteen hours from London to Cape Town and back.

May 15, 1937 – Madeleine Albright born in Czechoslovakia, American politician, diplomat, and academic; first woman to serve as U.S. Secretary of State (1997-2001); U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (1993-1997); honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.

May 15, 1938 – Nancy Garden born, American fiction author for children and young adults, best known for the 1982 lesbian novel Annie on My Mind; recipient of the 2003 ALA Margaret Edwards Award for “significant and lasting contribution to young adult literature.” In 1993, the LGBT organization Project 21 donated Annie on My Mind, along with Frank Mosca’s All-American Boys, to 42 high schools in the Kansas City area. Because both books included homosexual themes, some parents objected to the books being made available to high school students. During the controversy, copies of the book were burned. When asked, “Did you know your book has just been burned in Kansas City?” Gardener responded, “Burned! I didn’t think people burned books any more. Only Nazis burn books.”

May 15, 1938 – Diane Nash born, American activist and strategist in the civil rights movement, involved in the Freedom Riders, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Selma Voting Rights movement. In Nashville, Nash was behind the first successful civil rights campaign to integrate lunch counters.

May 15, 1940 – Nylon fabric and nylon stockings had first been introduced at the New York World’s Fair by DuPont; the first full-scale nylon manufacturing plant went into production at the end of 1939, and nylon stockings were first offered for sale on this day with the slogan “NYLON gives you something extra.” Sixty-four million pairs of nylons are sold the first year.

May 15, 1942 – Bill creating U.S. Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) is signed into law.

May 15, 1948 – Kate Bornstein born, American author, playwright, performance artist, and gender theorist; identifies as gender non-conforming, and says, “I don’t call myself a woman, and I know I’m not a man.” She was assigned male at birth, but later received gender affirmation surgery. She teaches workshops, and writes gender theory books, including Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us and Hello Cruel World, written to discourage non-conforming teens and others from committing suicide.

May 15, 1948 – Kathleen Sebelius born, American Democratic politician; U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (2009-2014); second woman Governor of Kansas (2003-2009); first woman chair of the Democratic Governors Association.

May 15, 1953 – Athene Donald born, British physicist; Professor of Experimental Physics at the University of Cambridge, and Master of Churchill College, Cambridge; noted for work on soft matter physics, particularly as it applies to living organisms, and on protein aggregation; awarded the Faraday Medal by the Institute of Physics in 2010.

May 15, 1954 – Diana Liverman born in Ghana to British parents, expert on human dimensions of global environmental change and the impact of climate on society; first woman appointed to a chair (Environmental Science) in the School of Geography at Oxford, and Director of the Environmental Change Institute.

May 15, 1970 – Anna Mae Hays and Elizabeth P. Hoisington are appointed as the first female United States Army Generals.

Elizabeth Paschel Hoisington and Anna Mae Hays

May 15, 1991 – Édith Cresson of the French Socialist Party, becomes France’s first woman prime minister (1991-1992).

May 15, 1998 – Muna El-Kurd born, Palestinian activist. In 2009, Israeli settlers took over half of her family’s home under an Israeli law that allows Jews to reclaim ownership of property lost in 1948. No such law entitles Palestinians to do the same in West Jerusalem or other parts of Israel. As of 2021, her family is awaiting the Israeli court’s decision which will evict them from their home, along with eleven other families in Sheikh Jarrah. They were initially given 30 days to vacate their home, but the lawyer for the family filed an appeal with the district court. Through viral posts and interviews, Muna and her brother Mohammed challenged the prevailing narratives about Palestinian resistance, humanizing the experiences of their neighbors and pushing back against suggestions that violence was being predominantly carried out by Palestinians. Charismatic and bold, they became the most recognizable voices of those threatened with losing their homes in Sheikh Jarrah. Around the world, their grassroots organizing helped inspire the Palestinian diaspora to renew protests. And in the U.S., long Israel’s strongest ally, polls show growing support for Palestinians, so far without any cost to public support for Israel. TIME put them on the magazine’s list of the 100 Most Influential People of 2021.

May 15, 2008 – California’s Supreme Court declared gay couples in the state can marry – a temporary victory for the gay rights movement that was overturned by the backlash passage of Proposition 8 the following November, but the state of California refused to defend the resulting law in court, and the proposition was overturned in federal court, but on appeal the Ninth Circuit ruled that it was unconstitutional for California to grant marriage rights to same-sex couples, only to take them away shortly after. This ruling was stayed, pending appeal to the United States Supreme Court, which ruled that the proponents of initiatives such as Proposition 8 did not possess legal standing in their own right to defend the law in federal court, and remanded the case for further proceedings. On June 28, 2013, the Ninth Circuit, on remand, dismissed the appeal for lack of jurisdiction and dissolved their previous stay of the district court’s ruling, enabling Governor Jerry Brown to order same-sex marriages to resume.

May 15, 2010 – Jessica Watson unofficially became the youngest person to sail, non-stop and unassisted around the world solo. (Watson’s route didn’t meet the criteria for circumnavigation of the globe set by the World Sailing Speed Record Council).

May 15, 2017 – In the first prosecution for violence against a transgender person under the 2009 U.S. Hate Crimes Act, the accused was sentenced to 49 years in prison. 17-year-old Mercedes Williamson was brutally murdered by her 29-year-old intimate partner, who claimed he killed her because he feared the gang he belonged to would kill him if they discovered his girlfriend had been born a man. He used a stun gun to incapacitate her, then stabbed her multiple times, and finally hit her with a hammer until she died.

May 15, 2020 – Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) issued a statement that gunmen who attacked a maternity unit run by the charity in a hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan, came “with the purpose of killing mothers in cold blood,” systematically shooting every woman in labour and new mothers they came across. Three women were killed in the delivery room, dying before their unborn babies could draw their first breaths. Eight women were killed in hospital beds, and five others were injured. Ten who found shelter in hospital safe rooms with staff survived, one giving birth as the attack raged around her. The total death toll was 24, including a midwife and two young boys. Two babies were also wounded, one needing emergency surgery in another hospital after being shot in the leg. The attack on May 12 shocked the country, which has already endured decades of bloodshed and tens of thousands of civilian deaths. No group claimed responsibility. The Taliban condemned the attack and denied any role. But Afghan authorities and analysts say their campaign of violence created an “enabling environment” for the attack. A top U.S. official blamed the local Islamic State affiliate for the killings, and urged the Taliban and Afghan authorities to return to peace talks that have crumbled since the slaughter.

May 15, 2021 – Historian Rebecca Hall was interviewed about her new graphic memoir, Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts, scheduled for release June 1, 2021. As a child, she was fascinated by her father’s stories about her grandmother Harriet Thorpe, born into slavery just before the Civil War. Hall grew up to be a tenants’ rights lawyer, but became disillusioned with the racism and sexism she saw everywhere in the justice system. She went back to school to earn a Ph.D. in history in 2004, and focused on the study of chattel slavery. More than anything, Hall wanted to learn about female resistance to slavery – because so little was ever taught about it at school. “If you’re a black child, you learn about slavery but you don’t learn about slave resistance or slave revolt in America,” Hall says. “But if you’re taught the history of resistance, that our people fought every step of the way, that is a recovery that is crucial to our pride in our humanity and our strength and struggle. So the issue of slave resistance is something I think everyone should know about.” Yet every book about slave revolts said more or less the same thing, that men led the resistance while enslaved women took a back seat. She began a painstaking process of sifting through the captain’s logs of slave ships, old court records in London and New York, letters between colonial governors and the British monarchy, newspaper cuttings, even forensic examinations from the bones of enslaved women uncovered in Manhattan. Much of it made for difficult reading – human beings described time and time again in documents and insurance books as “cargo” with footnotes describing “woman slave number one and woman slave number two.” “Seeing them writing about my people as objects – It was horrific,” she says. Lloyd’s of London, she found, “were insuring against the insurrection of cargo – I think that completely sums it up. How can cargo insurrect?” Hall discovered that out of the 35,000 slave ship voyages documented, there were revolts in a tenth of them. And when she analysed the difference between ships that had revolts and those that didn’t, she discovered there were more women on the ships with uprisings. There were procedures for running these ships, Hall explains – and right at the top was the instruction to keep everyone below deck and chained while you were on the coast of Africa. “But once you got into the Atlantic, you unchained the women and children and brought them on deck,” she says. That’s when Hall began to find stories of women accessing the weapons chests and finding ways to unchain the men below. “They used their mobility and access,” she says. She also found women, mostly unnamed, who were involved in slave revolts in America, including a pregnant woman whose execution for taking part in the 1712 slave revolt in New York was delayed until after she gave birth, because her baby was “someone’s property.” The book, Hall says, was intended as a passion project – if not to heal, at least to come to terms with the trauma of slavery in her own past. But after a small kickstarter project, Wake became the target of a bidding war among multiple publishers, with Simon & Schuster offering the highest ever advance for this type of illustrated novel.

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May 16, 1718 – Maria Gaetana Agnesi born, child prodigy, Italian mathematician, linguist, philosopher, and author. Known for her work on a curve which came to be called the “Witch of Agnesi,” which has since been much studied. She also wrote the first book dealing with both integral and differential calculus. In 1750, she was appointed as chair of mathematics and natural philosophy at Bologna Academy of Sciences, an incredible accomplishment for any mid-eighteenth century woman, when few universities in Europe allowed women to be students, let alone to hold teaching positions. Later in life, Agnesi, a deeply religious woman, joined a nunnery, devoting her final years to working with the poor.

May 16, 1804 – Elizabeth Palmer Peabody born, American educator, business woman, and translator. She founded the first English-language kindergarten in the United States. She had a reading knowledge of ten languages, and grounding in history. Peabody served as business manager for the Transcendentalist publication The Dial, and opened the Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s West Street Bookstore in her Boston home in the 1840s. Margaret Fuller held her “Conversations” women’s meetings there, and many women’s rights activists in the Boston area took part. Peabody translated a portion of the Buddhist Lotus Sutra from French into English, which was published in The Dial in 1844, shortly before it ceased publication because it lacked enough subscriptions to cover its costs.

May 16, 1880 – Anne O’Hare McCormick born, journalist and foreign news correspondent for the New York Times who wrote the first in-depth reports on the rise of Benito Mussolini and the Fascist movement in Italy, and interviewed Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, and FDR. She won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for Correspondence, the first woman to be awarded a major journalism Pulitzer, and was also the first woman member of the New York Times editorial board.

May 16, 1890 – Edith Grace White born, American zoologist and ichthyologist; noted for studies of elasmobranchs (sharks and rays); also published textbooks on genetics and biology; professor and department head of Biology at Wilson College for 30 years.

May 16, 1898 – Desanka Maksimović born, Serbian poet, author, and translator; became professor at Belgrade’s First High School for Girls in 1926. She was dismissed from her position by the Nazis in 1941. While working odd jobs to survive, she secretly wrote a collection of poems, including one about the Wehrmacht’s massacre of schoolchildren at Kragujevac, which were published after Serbia was liberated.

May 16, 1910 – Olga Bergholz born, Russian poet, gave speeches and read poems on the radio during the Siege of Leningrad (1941-1944).

May 16, 1923 – Victoria Fromkin born, American linguist who contributed to the field of Phonology – how sounds of a language are organized in the mind. Studied linguistic development in a child who had been in severe isolation for the first 13 years of her life. Fromkin was the first woman to become Vice Chancellor of Graduate Programs in the University of California system (1980-1989); elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences in 1996.

May 16, 1925 – Nancy Roman born, American astronomer and advocate for women in the sciences. She joined NASA in 1959, served as the manager the Astronomical Data Center at Goddard Space Flight Center, as chief of astronomy and solar physics, and then the first Chief of Astronomy and Relativity in NASA’s Office of Space Science (1963-1980), the first woman to hold an executive position at the space agency. She has often called “the Mother of Hubble” for her role in planning the Hubble Space Telescope.

May 16, 1929 – Adrienne Rich born, American poet, essayist, author, and feminist. She declined the National Medal of Arts in protest of a Congressional vote to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. In a New York Times review of Rich’s poetry, Craig Teicher described her impact: “Rich’s early books of poetry narrate an apprenticeship in the status quo, a slow, steady casting off of immeasurably old, unspeakably limiting ideas about what women could do, think, and be in relation to men, followed by the rigorous creation of an empowered female identity for the second half of the 20th century. For Rich, this meant a new life sprung from the old, as a lesbian and groundbreaking feminist writer, as a distiller and popularizer of academic feminist theory, and as a poet who would exert a reshaping influence over other writers forever after.”

May 16, 1931 – Hana Brady born Hanička Bradyová in Czechoslovakia, a Jewish girl who was 13 when she was murdered in the gas chambers at the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz in Polish occupied territory. At age eight, she and her older brother George saw their parents arrested and taken away by the Nazis. They never saw them again. The children were sent to Theresienstadt concentration camp. In 1944, Hana was deported to Auschwitz, and sent to the gas chambers a few hours after her arrival. Her brother survived by working as a laborer. In 1999, Fumiko Ishioka, director of the Tokyo Holocaust Education Resource Center, visited Auschwitz. Ishioka explains “I … asked for a loan of some children’s items. I specifically asked [for] a shoe, this little shoe, and I asked for a suitcase … A suitcase – that really tells you a story of how children, who used to live happily with their family, were transported and were allowed to take only one suitcase … “In Japan, the Holocaust is so far away. Some people don’t see any connection whatsoever. But when they look at the suitcase, these children [are] really shocked …” “That really helped them a lot, to focus on this one little life that was lost. They could really relate her to themselves and try to think of why such a thing could happen to a girl like her. Why the Jewish people? And why children? They then realized there were one and a half million children …” The suitcase has large writing on it, a name, birthdate, and the German word, Waisenkind (orphan). Ishioka began painstakingly researching Hana’s life and eventually found her surviving brother in Canada. The story of Hana Brady and how her suitcase led Ishioka to Toronto became the subject of a CBC documentary. Karen M. Levine, the documentary’s producer, was urged by a freidn in publishing to turn the story into a book. Said Levine: “I first read about Hana’s suitcase in December 2000 … in The Canadian Jewish News. My heart started to beat. I fell in love with the story instantly. This was a different kind of Holocaust story. It had at its centre a terrible sadness, one we all know too well. But it had a modern layer to it that lifted it up, that had connection, and even redemption.” In February 2004, Lara Brady, Hana’s niece, discovered inconsistencies between the suitcase on display and the suitcase pictured with Hana’s friend after the war in the 1960s. Not only did the physical suitcase appear newer than in the photographs, but the location of the handle was also reversed. In March, Fumiko and George Brady the Auschwitz museum director about the suitcase, who explained a replica had been created based on the pictures because the original suitcase was destroyed in what was probably an arson fire in 1984, while on loan to an English exhibit in Birmingham. As the museum personnel had omitted that information when they loaned it to the Tokyo Holocaust Education Resource Center, no one there realized the suitcase was a replica. The family and the Center assert that even as a replica, the suitcase’s contribution to the cause of human rights and peace education is not lessened. Karen M. Levine’s 2002 book, Hana’s Suitcase, became a bestseller and was honored with the National Jewish Book Award. It won the 2006 Yad Vashem award, presented to George Brady at a ceremony in Jerusalem.

Hana with George — replica of her suitcase

May 16, 1948 – Emma Georgina Rothschild-Sen born, British economic historian; professor of History and Economics at Harvard University. She sits on the board of directors of the United Nations Foundation.

May 16, 1951 – Janet Soskice born in Canada, Catholic theologian and philosopher; professor of Philosophical Theology and a fellow of Jesus College at Cambridge. her studies center on the role of women in Christianity, religious language, and the relationship between science and religion; author of The Sisters of the Sinai, about discovery by Agnes and Margaret Smith of the Syriac Sinaiticus, a 4^th century translation of the New Testament gospels.

May 16, 1963 – Rachel Griffith born, British-American professor of economics at the University of Manchester, and research director at the Institute for Fiscal Studies; first woman president of the European Economic Association (2015); joint managing editor of The Economic Journal (2011-2017); President of the Royal Economic Society for 2018-2019.

May 16, 2005 – The National Assembly of Kuwait voted 35-23 to pass legislation for women’s suffrage and the right of women to hold public office.

May 16, 2019 – Kay Ivey, Republican governor of Alabama, signed into law the most restrictive abortion bill in the U.S., effectively banning abortion except when the woman’s life is endangered. The bill’s supporters said they intended the law to give the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority an opportunity to overturn the 1972 landmark Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide. Alabama State Senator Linda Coleman-Madison, a Democrat, called it a violation of women’s rights: “It just completely disregards women and the value of women and their voice.”

May 16, 2019 – The U.S. birthrate dropped to a 32-year low in 2018, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported. About 3.8 million babies were born in the country in 2018, two percent fewer than in 2017. It was the fourth straight annual decline. “We’re clearly in the throes of major social change with regard to women getting married and choosing to have children,” said Donna Strobino, a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

May 16, 2020 – Sylvia Goldscholl at age 108 was one of the oldest survivors of Covid-19 in the U.S. In late April, 2020 her New Jersey nursing home told her family that she had the virus and was in isolation. “This is killing people in nursing homes all over New Jersey and the country,” said Nancy Chazen, a niece of Ms. Goldsholl. “Quite honestly, I thought that was going to be the end — I mean, she’s 108.” Two weeks later “They told us, ‘She’s fully recovered,’” said Ms. Chazen. Goldsholl was born December 29, 1911. As a child she lived through the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918 and 1919, and also lived through two world wars and the Great Depression. She said, “I survived everything because I was determined to survive.” She died on her 110^th birthday in December 2021.

May 16, 2021 – Elizabeth Rosenthal, editor-in-chief of Kaiser Health News (KHN), said that a major issue when COVID-19 cases began showing up in the U.S. was that “Americans simply were not used to the idea that infectious diseases could cause mass disaster.” There were news stories about epidemics in other parts of the world, but they hadn’t affected us. That mentality, combined with misinformation spread by then-President Donald Trump, made it easy for lies about the virus to perpetuate. Rosenthal published An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back, in 2018.

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The Feminist Cats Learn About
“The Other Family Doctor”

Karen Fine is a veterinarian and author of The Other Family Doctor: A Veterinarian Explores What Animals Can Teach Us About Love, Life, And Mortality.

The following quotes are from an interview on NPR with Dave Davies in March, 2023.

For years, she had a part-time clinical practice so she could make house calls:
“I loved going into people’s houses and sitting at their kitchen tables and seeing where their animals ate … I would say, you know, OK, what are you feeding them? And at the clinic, people don’t remember the name of the food. You can’t tell how much. And at home, someone might say, oh, he only gets a little bit. And I can look across the kitchen and see three overflowing food bowls.”

She talks about discovering narrative medicine in a medical journal for people:

“… I thought, oh, that’s so fascinating. It’s looking at the person’s story … a light went on for me. And I thought, well, that’s why I don’t like animals being dropped off, because I want to know the story. I don’t just want a history with lists of things checked off … I want to know the story. And when I understand the story, then I can understand not just what’s going on, but how to help. And that might be different with different stories.”

Of course the most difficult part of being a doctor, whether you’re an MD or a vet, is the suffering of dying patients and their families:

“…the reason I wrote the book is I see so much human suffering … I’ve seen so many times where people are so upset. And I’ve had people say to me, I’m so glad you helped me through this, or I don’t even know what I would have done if you hadn’t helped me. And it just makes me think, well, what resources are there? This should – it’s a difficult, painful situation, but it’s so common. And people need to recognize how common it is and feel more supported so that it’s not something that, I think, a lot of people feel terrible guilt afterwards. And that may also be related to the fact that we don’t really talk about the importance of this bond in some of these relationships that we have and how we feel when our animals die.”

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May 2023 – Women Trailblazers and Activists, 5-9 through 5-16

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The Feminist Cats Learn About
“The Other Family Doctor”

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

www.dailykos.com/…

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Sources

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The Feminist Cats Learn About“The Other Family Doctor”

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

www.dailykos.com/…

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Leave a Reply Cancel reply

The Feminist Cats Learn About
“The Other Family Doctor”

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: