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WOW2: July 2023 – Women Trailblazers and Activists – 7-9 thru 7-16 [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-07-08

“History is a conversation and

sometimes a shouting match

between present and past,

though often the voices we most

want to hear are barely audible.”

― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich,

author of Well-Behaved

Women Seldom Make History

______________



Welcome to WOW2, a four-times-a-month

sister blog to This Week in the War On Women

__________________



“I am a feminist, and what that means

to me is much the same as the meaning

of the fact that I am Black; it means that

I must undertake to love myself and to

respect myself as though my very life

depends upon self-love and self-respect.”

― June Jordan, Civil rights and LGBTQ+

activist, feminist, essayist,

poet, and journalist

______________

“Whatever we may do, excess will always

keep its place in the heart of man, in the

place where solitude is found. We all carry

within us our places of exile, our crimes

and our ravages. But our task is not to

unleash them on the world; it is to fight

them in ourselves and others.”

― Julian May, author, from

The Nonborn King

______________

The purpose of WOW2 is to learn about and honor women of achievement, including many who’ve been ignored or marginalized in most of the history books, and to mark events in women’s history.

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

THIS WEEK IN THE WAR ON WOMEN

will post shortly, so be sure to go there next, and

catch up on the latest dispatches from the frontlines.

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

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

____________________________

July 9, 1511 – Dorothea of Saxe-Lauenburg born, Queen consort of Denmark and Norway by her marriage to King Christian III. While she had no public power, she was a trusted advisor to her husband, and wielded some degree of power behind the scenes. She was a strict parent, both to her own children, and to several children of noble families that she raised as foster children, but she helped free her lady-in-waiting Birgitte Gøye from an engagement made against her will by her family when she was 14 years old. The queen persuaded her husband to launch an investigation into the matter, which resulted in a new law banning parents from arranging engagements for their minor children.

July 9, 1764 – Ann Radcliffe born, English novelist, pioneer of the Gothic novel; noted for The Romance of the Forest and The Mysteries of Udolpho.

July 9, 1811 – ‘Fanny Fern’ born as Sara Payson Willis; American author and a "witty and irreverent" columnist for the New York Ledger. She was a suffragist, and a founding member of Sorosis, the first club for women writers and artists in New York City.

July 9, 1858 – Kaikhusrau Jahan born, progressive Begum (ruler) of Bhopal (1901- 1926), greatly improved education and public health services for her people.

July 9, 1868 – The 14th Amendment to U.S. Constitution is ratified: grants citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the U.S.; guarantees equal protection of the laws. Designed to give citizenship and voting rights to former male slaves, even though gender is never specified. This was the amendment that Susan B. Anthony thought should give women the right to vote. What a difference it would have made if her view that “persons” included women had prevailed!

July 9, 1894 – Dorothy Thompson born, American journalist and radio broadcaster. She was part of the suffrage campaign from 1914 to 1920, then moved to Europe, where her success as an interviewer landed her a job as a foreign correspondent for the Philadelphia Ledger. She interviewed Hitler in 1931, and described him as “… ill poised and insecure. He is the very prototype of the little man." In 1934, she was the first American journalist expelled from Nazi Germany. In 1935, she started writing her column “On the Record” for the New York Herald Tribune, and also worked as a news commentator on the radio. In 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and Thompson went on the air for fifteen consecutive days and nights. She was recognized by Time magazine in 1939 as the second most influential woman in America after Eleanor Roosevelt. However, her disparaging remarks about black American voters caused controversy. She was an early supporter of Zionism, until she visited Palestine in 1945. When she wrote critically about the treatment of the Palestinians as the state of Israel was forming, it raised a firestorm, and her popularity waned.

July 9, 1915 – June Richmond born, American jazz singer; first African American singer to regularly perform with a white band when Jimmy Dorsey hired her in 1938 for his orchestra. She made several recordings with Dorsey for Decca Records. She next performed with Cab Calloway, and later became a successful soloist, then appeared in a featured role in a Broadway musical. She moved to Europe, lived in Paris but also performed in Stockholm. In 1957 in Paris, she recorded several songs with the orchestra of Quincy Jones. She died of a heart attack at age 47 in 1962.

July 9, 1917 – Krystyna Chlond Dańko born, Polish orphan in Otwock who saved the lives of her Jewish friend Lusia Kokszko, and Lusia’s family during the WWII Nazi occupation of Poland, smuggling two of them out of Otwock to Warsaw; she hid the rest of the family, and brought them food and clothing. In 1998, she was named Righteous among the Nations by Yad Vashem. Most of the Jews of Otwock perished in the Treblinka death camp, or were summarily shot when the Otwock ghetto was liquidated in September 1942.

July 9, 1919 – Peggy Swarbrick Braithwaite born; she was her father’s assistant as keeper of the Walney lighthouse near Barrow, Lancashire, and appointed as the first British woman principal light keeper in 1975. She retired in 1994, after serving for over 60 years. The Walney light was the last lighthouse in England to be automated, in 2003.

July 9, 1926 – Mathilde Krim born in Italy, American medical researcher, part of the team that developed a prenatal method to determine fetal gender. She was of the earliest researchers to recognize the grave threat of AIDS, and was founding chair of AIDS Medical Foundation which became AmfAR, an association for AIDS research. Honored in 2000 with Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the 2003 Jefferson Award for Greatest Public Service Benefiting the Disadvantaged. She died at age 91 in January 2018.

July 9, 1930 – Janice Lourie born, American computer scientist, graphic artist, and musician; pioneer in CAD/CAM for the textile industry, inventor of software tools facilitating textile production from artist to manufacturer. A founding member of the Camerata of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, playing the tenor shawm and psaltery from the museum collection.

July 9, 1931 – Sylvia A. Bacon born, American Associate Judge of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia (1970-1991), appointed by Richard Nixon; worked at the U.S. Department of Justice (1956-1970) under Ramsey Clark, helping to draft legislation for D.C. court reform.

July 9, 1936 – June Jordan born, American poet, writer, educator, feminist, civil rights and LGBTQ+ activist, columnist for The Progressive, librettist for the musical I Was Looking at the Ceiling and then I Saw the Sky; 1984 Achievement Award for International Reporting from the National Association of Black Journalists. She died of breast cancer at age 65 in June 2002.

July 9, 1944 – Judith M. Brown born in India; British historian, specialist in modern South Asia, and an Anglican priest; Beit Professor of Commonwealth History, and a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford (1990-2011); Director of Studies in History, Girton College, Cambridge (1969-1971); noted for Gandhi and Civil Disobedience: The Mahatma in Indian Politics 1928-1934.

July 9, 1950 – Gwen Guthrie born, R&B and soul singer-songwriter; known for her 1986 anthem “Ain’t Nothin’ Goin’ On But the Rent.” She wrote one of the first songs about AIDS, “Can’t Love You Tonight” and donated the song’s proceeds to the AIDS Coalition. She sang back-up for Aretha Franklin, Billy Joel, and Stevie Wonder before her solo career. Guthrie died of uterine cancer in 1999 at age 48.

July 9, 1953 – Margie Gillis born, Canadian modern dance choreographer and solo dancer; in 1987, she became the first modern dance artist awarded the Order of Canada; in 2008, Gillis was the inaugural recipient of the Stella Adler MAD Spirit Award for her involvement in social causes.

Margie Gillis performing her ‘Torn Roots, Broken Branches’

July 9, 1953 – Irina Latysheva born, Russian radio engineer and cosmonaut (1980-1993).

July 9, 1964 – Courtney Love born, American singer-songwriter, actress, and writer; co-creator of three volumes of the manga, Princess Ai, and a memoir, Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love, about her struggles with depression and drug abuse, and her tumultuous relationship with husband Kurt Cobain. A supporter of reforming the record industry to address piracy and putting more of the immense profits into helping the black community that has contributed so much to the industry. She is also a long-standing supporter of LGBTQ+ causes, participating in the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center “An evening with Women” events, to raise funds for food and shelter for homeless youth, legal aid, and health and mental health services.

July 9, 1974 – Siân Berry born, British politician and environmentalist; Member of the London Assembly since 2016; Co-Leader with Jonathan Bartley of the Green Party of England and Wales (2018-2021); Principal Speaker of the Green Party (2006-2007). A founder of the Alliance against Urban 4X4s, a campaign to stop sport utility vehicles from “taking over our cities” which places mock parking tickets on 4X4s.

July 9, 1978 – In hot, humid weather, 100,000 supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment (E.R.A.) marched in Washington DC, with banners in purple and white to honor the National Woman’s Suffrage Party of Alice Paul. Paul turned, immediately after the hard-won campaign for women’s right to vote, to making women’s legal equality a Constitutional amendment, first introduced in Congress in 1923, but not sent to the states for ratification until 1972. The march supported bill H.J.R. 638, to extend E.R.A.’s deadline to March 22, 1979. Only eight votes by white male state senators in three states kept the E.R.A. from being ratified by the deadline.

July 9, 1983 – Lucia Micarelli born, American violinist of Italian and Korean heritage; collaborator with singer-songwriter Josh Groban and the classic rock band Jethro Tull, and concertmaster with the Trans-Siberian Orchestra (TSO) in 2003. She released her first solo album, Music From a Farther Room, in 2004.

July 9, 1986 – New Zealand’s Homosexual Law Reform Act decriminalizes homosexuality.

July 9, 1987 – Rebecca Sugar born, American animator, producer, and songwriter; first woman animator to independently create a series for a network, the Cartoon Network series Steven Universe (2013-2019). Previously a writer and storyboard artist on the network’s Adventure Time series (2010-2013). Nominated 5 times for Primetime Emmy Awards.

July 9, 2013 – Michelle Knight, Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus, who were kidnapped, held captive in a Cleveland house and raped for over ten years, release a video, their first public statement since their escape. They thank the many supporters for “such an outpouring of love and kindness.” The Courage Fund, established to help them, raised over $1 million.

Amanda Berry — Gina DeJesus — Michelle Knight

July 9, 2018 – China announces that poet Liu Xia, under house arrest and 24-hour surveillance since 2010 when her husband, author and activist Liu Xiaobo, won the Nobel Peace Prize, will be allowed to leave the country for Berlin, Germany. She has never been charged with a crime. The announcement came just days before the one-year anniversary of Liu Xiaobo’s death from liver cancer while serving an 11-year sentence for “inciting subversion of state power.” His arrest and incarceration set off world-wide protests and appeals for his release.

Liu Xiaobo and Liu Xia

July 9, 2019 – British Members of Parliament voted resoundingly to extend same-sex marriage and access to abortion to Northern Ireland, bringing the region in line with the rest of the UK on the two significant social issues. The historic votes were greeted ecstatically by equalities campaigners. Both wins were the culmination of long campaigns by backbench Labour MPs, after the Northern Irish government was devolved, after being in political deadlock since 2017. The changes came via amendments to an otherwise technical government bill connected to budgets and elections for the devolved assembly. In the first amendment from Labour MP Conor McGinn, a longstanding campaigner for equal marriage in Northern Ireland, the Commons voted 383 to 73 to extend it to the region. In a vote soon afterwards, MPs approved an amendment by Labour MP Stella Creasy to extend abortion rights to Northern Ireland, the only part of the UK where it was illegal. The vote passed 332-99. Creasy’s amendment argued that abortion laws in Northern Ireland, where women seeking a termination can face life imprisonment, were contrary to international human rights norms. “How much longer are the women of Northern Ireland expected to wait?” she told MPs. “How much more are they expected to suffer before we speak up – the best of what this place does – as human rights defenders, not human rights deniers?” After the vote, Creasy tweeted: “Thank you to everyone who today stood up for equality in Northern Ireland – whether for same-sex marriage or abortion, today we have said everyone in the UK deserves to be treated as an equal. There’s a road to go yet but today a big step forward.”

Stella Creasy and Conor McGinn

July 9, 2020 – Gender Avenger, a non-profit focusing on gender balance at all levels of government and business, updated their GA Tally app, a tool to track representation of women on panels and at other public forums, putting more emphasis on tracking participation by women of color. Founder Gina Glantz says, “Always begin with the numbers” to see who is at the table and who is heard. Also in the news, New American Leaders, a nonprofit mentoring first-time candidates for public office who are first or second generation immigrants, published a report on state legislatures: in 2020, 81% of the 7,383 state legislators in the U.S. were White, and over 71% were male.

July 9, 2021 – In the UK, a new, more comfortable way of detecting breast cancer to enable tumours to be identified at an earlier stage entered trials. Mammograms are less effective in detecting early stages of cancer in young women because their breasts contain more dense, fibrous tissue and less fat than post-menopausal women, making it harder to distinguish between cancers and fibrous tissue. The new technique, called multiparametric MRI, originally developed to evaluate liver diseases without the need for a painful biopsy, is already in widespread use across Europe and the US. Like conventional MRIs, it uses strong magnetic fields and radiowaves to excite particles called protons in the tissue. Differences in the time protons take to settle creates a “map” of the various tissues in the breast. However, by combining images created by different MR pulses and sequences, multiparametric MRI enables even more detailed maps to be created. “We believe if you differentiate the tissue, instead of looking at the blood vessels around the tumour, we should be able to spot not only tumours in dense breasts, but potentially tumours which aren’t seen on mammograms,” said Professor Sally Collins, a consultant obstetrician and medical lead for women’s health at the Oxford-based Perspectum Diagnostics, who herself recently underwent treatment for breast cancer.

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July 10, 1553 – Lady Jane Grey, nominated in his will by the dying boy King Edward VI, as his successor in preference to his Catholic half-sister Mary, begins her nine day reign as Queen of England and Ireland.

Miniature portrait thought to be Lady Jane Grey

July 10, 1724 – Eva Ekeblad born, Swedish countess, salon host, agronomist, and scientist; discovered a method to make flour and alcohol from potatoes, transforming potatoes from an exotic food grown only in the aristocrats’ greenhouses to a staple food of Sweden, significantly reducing the country’s incidence of famine; first woman to become a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1748.

July 10, 1875 – Mary McLeod Bethune born to former slaves, American educator and civil rights leader; founder of the Literary and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls (later Bethune-Cookman University); president (1917-1925) of the Florida chapter of the National Association of Colored Women; registered black voters in spite of threats from the Ku Klux Klan, and became NACW national president in 1924. Under her tenure, NACW became the first black-controlled organization headquartered in Washington DC. In 1935, she founded the National Council of Negro Women. She became a full-time staff member of the National Youth Administration in 1936, then Director of the NYA’s Division of Negro Affairs in 1938, and an advisor to President Franklin Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt.

July 10, 1882 – Ima Hogg born; in spite of her cruel naming by her father, Texas governor Jim Hogg, became a leader of Texas society, respected as a philanthropist and patron of the arts. She established and managed the Houston Symphony Orchestra, and was president of the Symphony Society. Also founded the Houston Child Guidance Center, the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health, and sat on the Houston School Board, working to remove gender and race criteria from teacher and staff pay, and started art education programs for black students. She was also a savior of many historic buildings.

July 10, 1884 – Harriet Wiseman Elliott born, American educator and public official, Dean of Women at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro; during WWII, Chair of the Woman’s Division of the U.S. War Finance Committee, and Deputy Director of the U.S. Office of Price Administration.

July 10, 1891 – Edith Hinkley Quimby born, American medical researcher and physicist, pioneer in nuclear medicine; developed diagnostic and therapeutic applications of X-rays, and instituted protections for both the technicians and the patients from overexposure to radioactive materials, assuring using lowest dose possible. In 1940, she was the first woman recipient of the American Radium Society’s Janeway Medal; awarded the 1941 Gold Medal of the Radiological Society of North America; and a charter member of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine.

July 10, 1896 – Thérèse Casgrain born, Canadian feminist, reformer and politician, women’s suffrage movement leader and a founder of the Provincial Franchise Committee for women’s emancipation. Hosted the radio show Fémina in the 1930s; first woman to lead a political party in Canada, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), predecessor of Canada’s New Democratic Party.

July 10, 1905 – Mildred Wirt Benson born, American journalist who wrote 23 of the 30 original Nancy Drew mysteries (the series was written by ghost writers but published under “Carolyn Keene”).

July 10, 1910 – Mary Bunting born, microbiologist, president of Radcliffe College (1959-1972); oversaw Radcliffe’s integration with Harvard; founded Radcliffe’s Bunting Institute; helped women return to careers after family obligations. She was the first woman on the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.

July 10, 1921 – Eunice Kennedy Shriver born, American activist, founder of Camp Shriver, now the Special Olympics; long time advocate for children with disabilities, and recipient of many awards and honors including the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

July 10, 1922 – Jean Kerr born, American author and playwright; Please Don’t Eat the Daisies was a bestseller.

July 10, 1929 – Winnie Ewing born, Scottish lawyer and Scottish National Party politician; Member of the UK Parliament (1967-1979), the European Parliament (1979-1999), and the Scottish Parliament (1999-2003); President of the Scottish National Party (1987-2005).

July 10, 1930 – Janette Sherman born, American physician, pioneer in the field of occupational and environmental health, toxicologist, author, and activist for bans on nuclear power and dangerous chemicals. She researched nuclear radiation, pesticides, birth defects, breast cancer, and illnesses caused by toxins in homes, and an expert witness or consultant in 5,000 workers' compensation cases about deadly chemicals, contaminated water, and toxic pesticides. In the 1970s, while practicing internal medicine in Detroit, she recognized common profiles in patients which became the basis of clinical research, and led a campaign and lawsuits against the auto industry as an occupational source of illnesses among her patients, leading to regulations for greater protection of the workers, and banning some chemicals from the workplace. Among the largest collections of medical-legal files in the U.S., her records are preserved at the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Author of Chemical Exposure and Disease: Diagnostic and Investigative Techniques (1988); Life’s Delicate Balance: Causes and Prevention of Breast Cancer (2000); and was the editor of Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment (2007).

July 10, 1931 – Alice Munro born, Canadian author and short story writer, recipient of Canada’s Governor General’s Award, the Man Booker International Prize, and the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature.

July 10, 1931 – Julian May born, American science fiction, fantasy, and children’s author under several pen names, including Lee N. Falconer and Ian Thorne; best known for the series Saga of Pliocene Exile and Galactic Milieu. She died at age 86 in 2017.

July 10, 1939 – Mavis Staples born, African American rhythm-and-blues and gospel singer, and civil rights activist. Her 2010 album, You Are Not Alone, won a Grammy for Best Americana Album.

July 10, 1943 – Inonge Mbikusita-Lewanika born, Zambian politician; Republic of Zambia Ambassador to the U.S. (2003-2008); Zambian special envoy to the African Union (2001-2003.

July 10, 1949 – Anna Czerwińska born, Polish mountaineer and author; first Polish woman to reach the Seven Summits, and at age 50, the oldest woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest. She and Krystyna Palmowska were the first women to climb the North Face of the Matterhorn in the Alps.

July 10, 1959 – Ellen Kuras born, American cinematographer and filmmaker; one of the first women members of the American Society of Cinematographers; known for her cinematography work on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and her directorial debut, The Betrayal, winner of a Primetime Emmy Award for Non-Fiction Filmmaking, and nominated for a 2009 Oscar for Best Documentary Feature .

July 10, 1966 – Anna Bråkenhielm born, Swedish publisher and television producer; owner and CEO of Passion for Business magazine; CEO of Strix Television and Silverback productions.

July 10, 1967 – Gillian Tett born, British journalist and columnist for the Financial Times, one of the first to warn that a financial crisis was looming in 2007.

July 10, 1999 – U.S. women’s soccer team wins the FIFA Women’s World Cup at Pasadena’s Rose Bowl in California, defeating China 5-4. The final was watched by 90,185 spectators, a new world record for a women’s sporting event.

July 10, 2019 – The Democratic majority House passed a bill seeking to remove wording in a U.S. law that describes a president as male. H.R. 3285, dubbed the "21st Century President Act," would change the language of a federal law making it a crime to threaten the president and first family. The current law defines the president as male and the president's spouse as female. The new bill would replace references to the president's "wife" and "widow" to "spouse" and "surviving spouse." Representative Mark Pocan (D-Wisconsin), an openly gay congressman who is co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said the new wording was necessary to reflect modern reality. "Currently federal law does not reflect the reality we could have a female or a gay president as soon as 2021," Pocan said. It never came to a vote in the Senate.

July 10, 2019 – Support for legal abortion tied the record highest level of support in a newly released Washington Post -ABC News poll. 60% of the survey's respondents said abortion should be legal in most or all cases, up from 55% in a similar poll in 2013. 36% of respondents said abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. That figure tied a record low. Support for legal abortion rose by 16 percentage points to 71% among independent women voters, and by 12 points to 77% among Democrats. 32% percent said their states should make abortion access easier, while 24% said their states should make it harder. 41% percent said their states shouldn't make it harder or easier for women to get abortions.

July 10, 2020 – U.S. servicewomen went public with their own stories of sexual assault after the brutal murder of Vanessa Guillén, a 20-year-old U.S. Army Private, made national headlines. She had told her family she was sexually harassed by a sergeant at Fort Hood before she went missing in April. Her remains were not found until the end of June. The girlfriend of Spc. Aaron Robinson said in an affidavit that he had killed Guillén with a hammer, then she had helped him dismember and burn Guillén’s body. Robinson shot himself when police officers approached him on July 1, 2020. Two former servicewomen told their stories of sexual abuse and how their reports were mishandled by authorities, prompting Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden to call for the military to change how it handles reports of sexual misconduct. Under increasing pressure, Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy ordered an "independent and comprehensive" review of the command climate at Fort Hood. In December 2020, McCarthy announced at a press briefing that 14 “senior officers” from corps to squad level were disciplined for multiple “leadership failures.” The investigation found a "permissive environment for sexual assault and sexual harassment at Fort Hood," and a new investigation was launched into the 1st Cavalry Divisions command climate and its program for preventing and responding to sexual harassment and assault. McCarthy said Guillén’s murder "shocked our conscience and brought attention to deeper problems" at Fort Hood and across the Army more widely, saying it "forced us to take a critical look at our systems, our policies, and ourselves." A 150 page report by the Fort Hood Independent Review Committee found that not only was the climate at Fort Hood tolerant of sexual harassment and assault, and but other crimes were committed at a high rate. Chris Swecker, the review team’s leader, said, “This is a military installation — it’s a gated community, and there are a lot of tools that you can use to suppress crime. What we found was that there was no proactive effort to suppress crime, to address drug issues, to address violent crime, and suicides are extremely high. What we found was that because [the local Criminal Investigation Command detachment] was so inexperienced and so taxed for resources, they really didn’t dive deep on suicides to find out why.” In March, 2021, a new policy was put out by Army Forces Command, covering all active-duty personnel, that “ensuring investigations are conducted by an outside investigator will aid in building trust and confidence in the sexual harassment/assault response and prevention reporting system.” Sexual assault and harassment have plagued the military for decades. Recent reports from the RAND Corporation found that service members are more likely to leave the military after being assaulted and that units that were lax about sexual harassment experienced more assault. The reports said both were readiness issues and hurt the military’s ability to retain top talent. As one of his first acts in office in 2021, incoming Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin mandated a commission on sexual assault. The Independent Review Commission on Sexual Assault in the Military finished its work in the fall of 2021 and issued 82 recommendations.

Vanessa Guillén — Rising rates of sexual assault in the US military 2010-2019

July 10, 2021 – In Spain, a growing number of winemakers are women, including Almudena Alberca, who became Spain’s first female master of wine in 2018. María Vargas, of the Marqués de Murrieta bodega, is one of the very few – male or female – whose wine has been awarded 100 points by wine guru Robert Parker, but Anne Cannan, oenologist at Clos Figueras in Priorat, says that it’s still the men who get all the attention and win most of the prizes. She helps organise an annual fair of Priorat’s female winemakers and supports groups such as Mujeres del Vino. “It’s a bit like we’re saying, hey, we’re here and we’re making wine,” Cannan says. “People don’t realise that there are so many women making wine … But when you say, let’s have a women-only wine group, there are those who say, oh no, I’m not a feminist, because they worry about what people will think. We’ve got a long way to go in Spain before women really have confidence in themselves.”

Almudena Alberca — María Vargas — Anne Cannan

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July 11, 1746 – Baroness Frederika von Riedesel born as Frederika Charlotte von Massow, German writer. Called Charlotte by her family, in 1762, at age 16, she married Freidrich Riedesel of Brunswick after he was wounded and she helped nurse him back to health. He became a general, and Charlotte and their children followed him to America in 1777, where he served on the British side during the Saratoga Campaign in the American Revolutionary War. She kept a journal of the campaign, recording witnessing several battles, tending wounded soldiers, and escaping a fire in the house where she was staying with her daughters. With other women and children, and wounded soldiers, Charlotte and her girls sheltered in the cellar of Marshall House, badly damaged by American cannon fire, outside Saratoga. She became the group’s leader. A German soldier described her as an "angel of comfort" who "restored order in the chaos." Following the British surrender on October 17, 1777, Charlotte and her daughters were guests of American General Philip Schuyler, until they traveled with the defeated army to Boston, where they were to sail back to Europe. However, the terms of surrender were rejected by Continental Congress, and they spent the next four years as prisoners of war, first in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In November, 1778, they were marched south to Charlotteville, Virginia. Her husband became ill, and in 1779, they were allowed to move to New York City, where she gave birth to a fourth daughter they named America. The family then survived an outbreak of smallpox, thanks to her nursing. Finally, in July, 1781, the family was allowed to go to Canada, and from there sailed home to Germany. General Riedesel died in 1800, and Charlotte published her journals. Her book became an important first-hand account of the Saratoga Campaign. Baroness Riedesel died in Berlin, at age 61 in March, 1808.

July 11, 1850 – Annie Armstrong born, American lay Southern Baptist leader; co-founder and first correspondent secretary (de facto leader – 1888-1906) of the Women’s Missionary Union, in spite of fierce opposition by male Southern Baptist leaders. She worked tirelessly advocating for missionaries, especially those in the U.S. and Canada, telling their stories and raising funds to support their missions.

July 11, 1851 – Millie and Christine McCoy born into slavery in North Carolina; American twins, conjoined at the lower spine and standing at about a 90 degree angle from each other. As slaves, they were exhibited until after the Civil War, when the freed twins received an education, learning five languages, dancing, and music, and had a successful career as “The Two-Headed Nightingale” with the Barnum Circus until their deaths from tuberculosis at age 61 in 1912.

July 11, 1871 – Edith Rickert born, American author and influential medieval scholar at the University of Chicago; expert on Chaucer. She worked as a Cryptographer in Washington DC during World War I.

July 11, 1881 – Isabel Martin Lewis born, American astronomer; first woman hired by the U.S. Naval Observatory, as an assistant astronomer; elected in 1918 as a member of the American Astronomical Society. After her son’s birth, she worked part-time at the observatory, but wrote three books and countless articles to popularize astronomy and earth science, including a monthly column for thirty years in the American Nature Association’s Nature Magazine (not the same as the journal Nature). She returned to full-time work after her husband died in 1927, and was promoted to Assistant Scientist, then in 1930 to the rank of Astronomer; specialized in eclipses, contributing a faster and more accurate method of determining where an eclipse would be visible, and of the moon’s occultations. She went on solar eclipse expeditions to Russia in 1936 and to Peru in 1937, and retired from the Naval Observatory in 1951, but still wrote newspaper and magazine articles; her career was one the longest and most successful of any woman astronomer in the first half of the 20 th century.

July 11, 1894 – Erna Mohr born, German zoologist, associated with the Zoological Museum Hamburg, where she started as a volunteer (1914-1934), then was head of the Fish Biology Department (1934-1936), the Department of Higher Vertebrates (1936-1946), and finally Curator of the Vertebrate Department (1946-1968?). She made contributions to ichthyology and mammalogy in over 400 published works; first woman elected as an Honorary Member of the American Society of Mammalogists.

July 11, 1901 – Gwendolyn ‘Madame Liz’ Lizarraga born, Belizean businesswoman, women’s rights activist, and politician; founded the United Women’s Group in 1959, with 900 members, to empower women culturally, economically, and politically; co-founder of the United Women’s Credit Union. She helped women to become “property owners” (then a requirement for voters) by surveying and mapping parcels in the swamps and registering them with the Lands department. In 1961, women could finally run for office in the national elections. Lizarraga won her race with 69% of the vote, the first woman elected to the British Honduras Legislative Assembly (1961-1974 – now Belize House of Representatives), and was the first woman appointed as a government minister, as Minister of Education, Housing and Social Services. In 1969, Lizarraga spearheaded a low-cost housing project, and spoke against granting casino concessions. She collected folklore and music, helping to revive the Mestizada dances. She was also a chess player, and an organizer of the first Belize chess club.

July 11, 1905 – Betty Allan born, Australian statistician and biometrician; earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics at the University of Melbourne in 1926, then a master’s in 1928 for her work with Professor John Henry Michell on solitary waves on liquid-liquid interfaces. On a scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge, she worked on agricultural statistics. In 1930, she returned to Australia, and worked as a biometrician in the Division of Plant Industry of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), which was founded in 1916, but lacked funding until 1926. She was the first statistician at CSIRO, and the “effective founder of the CSIRO Division of Mathematics and Statistics.” Allan also taught a Canberra University College and Australian Forestry School. In 1935, she helped found the Australian Institute of Agricultural Science. In 1940, she married CSIRO botanist Patrick Joseph Calvert, and was forced to retire at age 35 by laws which banned married women from public service. She died in 1952 at age 47.

July 11, 1906 – Grace Mae Brown , factory worker at the Gillette Skirt Company in Cortland NY, became pregnant during an affair with the owner’s nephew, Chester Gillette. He took her to Big Moose Lake in the Adirondacks, where he registered at the hotel under a false name, took her out on the lake in a rowboat, then struck her on the head. She fell out of the boat and drowned. His trial and conviction attracted national attention, inspiring Theodore Dreiser to write An American Tragedy, in which he uses direct quotes from Grace Brown’s love letters.

July 11, 1918 – Venetia Burney born, English girl credited by Clyde Tombaugh with suggesting Pluto as the name for his 1930 discovery when she was 11 years old. The asteroid 6235 Burney and Burney Crater on Pluto were named in her honour. In July 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft was the first to visit Pluto and carried an instrument named Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter in her honour. As an adult, she taught economics and mathematics at girls’ schools in the London area.

July 11, 1938 – Laurel Thatcher Ulrich born, historian, author of A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard based on her diary, 1785–1812 and Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History.

July 11, 1944 – Patricia Polacco born, American author and illustrator of over 60 books, mostly for children; Thank You, Mr. Falker, The Lemonade Club, Mr. Lincoln’s Way, and The Mermaid’s Purse.

July 11, 1946 – Sarah Blaffer Hrdy born, primatologist and author, studied evolution of primate social behavior, especially the role of females and mothers in evolution; The Woman Who Never Evolved, Mothers and Others.

July 11, 1953 – Patricia Reyes Spíndola born, Mexican actress, director, and teacher; awarded four Ariel Awards by the Mexican Academy of Cinematographic Arts (AMACC), two for Best Actress, and two for Best Supporting Actress. She played Matilde Kahlo in the biographical film, Frida. In the 200s, she began directing Mexican telenovelas, including 85 episodes of La mujer del Vendaval (2012-2013). She and her sister, Marta Reyes Sp í ndola, run M& M Studio, where she also teaches. In 2011, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and went through a successful mastectomy. In April 2015, she released her book La vuelta da muchas vidas (The Return Gives Many Lives).

July 11, 1954 – Julia King born, Baroness Brown of Cambridge, British engineer, Ph.D. in fracture mechanics; Life Peer member of the House of Lords since 2015.

July 11, 1960 – Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is published.

July 11, 1967 – Jhumpa Lahiri born in London; American author and professor of creative writing at Princeton; daughter of Bengali Indian emigrants, who moved to the U.S. when she was two. Her debut short story collection Interpreter of Maladies won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

July 11, 1994 – Nina Nesbitt born, Scottish singer-songwriter and musician; known for her 2013 single “Stay Out.” Participant in the mothers2mothers fundraiser, raising half a million pounds to support pregnant women and new mothers living with HIV. Attended the Women in the World Summit, discussing social media’s impact on body image.

July 11, 20 17 – A number of women in Iran, by not wearing a hijab while driving, sparked a national debate about whether a car is a private space where they can dress more freely. Obligatory wearing of the hijab has been policy in the Islamic republic since the 1979 revolution, but the establishment has a great deal of difficulty enforcing it. Observers in Tehran say women who drive with their headscarves resting on their shoulders, called by opponents a “bad hijab,” are becoming a familiar sight. Even though the police regularly stop these drivers, fining them or even temporarily seizing their vehicle, such acts of resistance continue, infuriating hardliners. Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, argues that people’s private space should be respected and opposes a crackdown on women drivers who don’t wear the hijab. He said explicitly that the police’s job is not to administer Islam. While judicial authorities and the police oppose the idea that the inside of a car is a private space, many in Iran do believe it is. Local media often refrain from directly criticising the mandatory hijab, but the debate over what constitutes a private space allows newspapers and even state news agencies to publish articles reflecting views from both sides. Hossein Ahmadiniaz, a lawyer, said that infringing on people’s private spaces was like infringing their citizen’s rights, arguing that it was up to parliamentarians to define the private space, not the police. “The law says that the space within a car is a private space,” he said. “The government’s citizen’s rights charter [launched by Rouhani] also considers a car to be a private space and it is incumbent upon enforcers to respect that.” He says wearing a so-called “bad hijab” is not a crime under Iranian law. But Saeid Montazeralmahdi, a spokesperson for the Iranian police, disagreed. “What is visible to the public eye is not private space and norms and the rules should be respected within cars.” He also warned car owners against using tinted glass to prevent onlookers from seeing into the car.

July 11, 20 20 – British Labour MP Dawn Butler closed down her constituency office in Willesden, North London, because of escalating violent racist threats and verbal abuse, including bricks thrown the through the windows. Speaking to The Observer newspaper, Butler said, “We had no choice. The safety of my four staff members, which include a black male and black female, is paramount and even though we have mostly been working from home in lockdown, it is clear we could no longer operate from there.” She added, “ It got really bad after Brexit and again now since the death of George Floyd.” Throughout her 15 years as a Labour member of parliament, she’s faced a significant level of racist abuse, including once being escorted out from a members’ room in the Houses of Parliament by a police officer who didn’t believe she was an MP, in spite of her colleagues vouching for her. In 2019, she was attacked on the London tube by a member of her constituency who threatened to kill her, but when she raised the incident with parliament, “I was told that the abuse I was receiving wasn’t enough to warrant any special security measures. I was really nervous about travelling and anxious about taking public transport after that attack. How much abuse do I have to get before it was enough?” She understands why the party is losing support with young black, Asian, and minority ethnic voters: “I don’t blame anyone for being unforgiving and uncompromising in this moment. Young black people are seeking meaningful change and commitment and nothing less will do. I completely endorse that. The Labour party is an anti-racist party but it has to prove that. It’s not something that is a given, it is something that has to be re-earned.” Keir Starmer, leader of the Labour Party, tweeted after the attacks on her office, “I have spoken to @DawnButlerBrent to offer the Labour Party’s full support and solidarity. The racist abuse that Dawn and her staff have suffered is appalling. Dawn’s voice is vital. The racism that our Black MPs face has no place in society.”

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July 12, 1879 – Margherita Piazzola Beloch born, Italian mathematician; fields of study were algebraic geometry, photogrammetry, and algebraic topology; notable for her work on birational transformations in space, contributions to the theory of skew algebraic curves, and the topological properties of algebraic curves.

July 12, 1895 – Kirsten Flagstad born, Norwegian Wagnerian soprano, ranked among the greatest singers of the 20th century.

July 12, 1911 – Johanna Moosdorf born in Leipzig, German writer and poet; in the spring of 1933, her first volume of poetry, was withdrawn from publication because her husband, Paul Bernstein, a political scientist and teacher, was also a Jew. He was banned from working, and they went through a pro forma divorce so that she could continue working, and provide for their two children. In 1944, Bernstein was sent to Theresienstadt, and then to Auschwitz where he was murdered shortly before the end of WWII. Moosdorf fled with the children to Sudetenland. After the war, she worked as a culture editor at the Leipziger Volkszeitung and became editor-in-chief of the literary newspaper März, which was banned in 1948 because of “western tendencies.” She worked in a lignite combine, then moved to West Berlin in 1950 after threat of political persecution. Since then she has lived as a freelance writer. Her novel Next Door translated into English by Michael Glenny in 1964. She married again, but her second husband died in 1988, and she became house-bound because of an incurable eye disease. Moosdorf died in obscurity in 2000 at age 88, but some of her books have recently been reprinted.

July 12, 1918 – Dame Mary Glen-Haig born; British fencer, hospital administrator, and one of the first women members of the International Olympic Committee (1982-2012). She fenced in four Olympics: 1948, 1952, 1956 and 1960. In the British Empire and commonwealth Games, she won two gold medals for Individual Foil. She was a district administrator of a hospital in West Kensington, London (1974-1982). Glen-Haig continued to fence into her 70s, and was chair of the Central Council of Physical Recreation in the 1970s. She appeared during the conclusion of the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, and was an ambassador for Britain at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. She died at age 96 in 2014.

July 12, 1918 – Doris Grumbach born, American novelist, biographer, essayist, and co-owner of Wayward Books bookstore in Sargentville ME; literary editor of The New Republic (1972-1974); wrote novels about women, many with gay and lesbian themes, and two memoirs: Coming into the End Zone, and Extra Innings.

July 12, 1920 – Beah Richards born, American stage, film, and television actress, author, poet, playwright, civil rights activist, and pacifist; she appeared in the original Broadway productions of The Miracle Worker and A Raisin in the Sun, and the film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? But her remarkable poem, “A Black Woman Speaks of White Womanhood, of White Supremacy, of Peace” written in 1950, and first performed by her at the American People’s Peace Congress, has been nearly forgotten.

July 12, 1928 – Pixie Williams born, New Zealand singer of Māori descent, won a triple platinum award from the Recording Industry Association of New Zealand for her “Blue Smoke” and a single platinum award for “Let’s Talk It Over.”

July 12, 1938 – Eiko Ishioka born, Japanese art director, costume designer, and graphic designer for stage, screen, and print media. Won the 1992 Oscar for Best Costume Design for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and was posthumously nominated for a costume design Oscar for the 2012 film Mirror Mirror. Ishioka died of pancreatic cancer in 2012.

costume for ‘The Fall’ — Eiko Ishioka

July 12, 1943 – Christine McVie born, British singer-songwriter and keyboardist, solo artist and member of Fleetwood Mac, inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

July 12, 1944 – Delia Ephron born, American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter; co-author with her sister Nora of the play Love, Loss and What I Wore, which ran Off-Broadway for over 2 ½ years; her screenplays include The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and You’ve Got Mail.

July 12, 1944 – Arlene Raven born Arlene Rubin; feminist art historian, author, critic, and curator; co-founder in 1973 of the Feminist Studio Workshop with Judy Chicago and Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, which was housed in the Los Angeles Women’s Building. That year, she also co-founded the Center for Feminist Art Historical Studies with Ruth Iskin. Co-founder of Chrysalis magazine. A founding member in 1976 of the Lesbian Art Project, and a founder of the Women’s Caucus for Art. In the 1980s she was chief art critic for the Village Voice. She died of cancer in 2006 at age 62.

July 12, 1952 – Irina Bokova born, Bulgarian politician and diplomat; first woman Director-General of UNESCO (2009-2017); Bulgarian Minister of Foreign Affairs (acting/1996-1997), Bulgarian Ambassador to France and Monaco; advocate for gender equality, improved education, and preventing funding for terrorism, especially by enforcing protection of intellectual goods; firm opponent of racism and anti-Semitism; led UNESCO’s activities on Holocaust remembrance.

July 12, 1958 – Tonya Williams born in London, American-Canadian actress, television producer, and director; in 2001, she became the founder, as well as the executive and artistic director, of the Reelwood Film Festival in Toronto, showcasing talent from ethnically diverse communities.

July 12, 1962 – Joanna Shields born in America, Baroness Shields, British Conservative politician and Group CEO of BenevolentAI; Life peer in the House of Lords; In 2014, she founded WePROTECT, an initiative to facilitate internet companies cooperatively developing technology to combat online child abuse and exploitation. In 2016, it merged with other stakeholders to form WePROTECT Global Alliance to End Child Sexual Exploitation Online.

July 12, 1969 – Chantal Jouanno born, French UDI (center-right) politician and former French karate champion: French Senator for Paris since 2011.

July 12, 1969 – Anne-Sophie Pic born, French chef; fourth woman to win three Michelin stars, for her family’s restaurant, Maison Pic, in Southern France.

July 12, 1970 – Aure Atika born in Portugal to Moroccan-Jewish parents, French actress, screenwriter, and director; director of À quoi ça sert de voter écolo? (What’s the point of voting Green?), winner of 2004’s Prix de la Fondation Beaumarchais for best short film.

July 12, 1971 – Loni Love born, African American comedian, actress, author, and a host on The Real talk show (2013-2022). She switched from electrical engineering to music engineering, then won a $50 prize in a stand-up comedy competition, and played clubs while keeping her day job at Xerox, becoming a Laugh Factory regular in Los Angeles. After eight years at Xerox, Love resigned during a layoff to prevent someone else from losing their job, and pursued comedy full-time.

July 12, 1972 – Shirley Chisholm, the first woman to run for the Democratic presidential nomination, received 152 votes in the first ballot at the Democratic National Convention; also the first black person to receive convention votes for U.S. President at a major political party convention.

July 12, 1979 – Brooke Baldwin born, American television journalist and news anchor; anchored CNN Newsroom with Brook Baldwin. In 2017, she hosted the American Woman series, featuring Sheryl Crow, Betty White, Ava DuVernay, Diane von Fürstenberg, Issa Rae, Ashley Graham, Tracy Reese, and Pat Benatar.

July 12, 1984 – Democratic presidential candidate Walter F. Mondale named New York Congresswoman Geraldine A. Ferraro as his running mate, the first woman to run for V.P. on a major party ticket.

July 12, 1990 – Dobsonville shanty town women in Soweto, South Africa, strip to the waist and confront bulldozers, trying to stop demolition of their homes ordered by government authorities. Dobsonville echoed the destruction of Sophiatown in Soweto between 1955 and 1960, (after passage of the Native Resettlement Act No. 19 of 1954), forcible removal by police of over 60,000 residents, in spite of protests and violent confrontations.

July 12, 1997 – Malala Yousafzai born, Pakistani universal education and human rights advocate; youngest person, at age 17, to win a Nobel Prize, as co-recipient of the 2014 Peace prize; she survived a Taliban assassination attempt in 2012, targeted because of her blog, written as ‘BBC Urdu’ detailing the Taliban occupation of the Swat district of Pakistan, brought to global attention by a 2010 NY Times documentary about her.

July 12, 2010 – Roman Polanski declared a free man, no longer confined to house arrest in his Alpine villa, after Swiss authorities rejected a U.S. request for the Oscar-winning director's extradition because of a 32-year-old conviction for sex with a minor, a 13-year-old girl. The five original charges against him were for rape by use of drugs, perversion, sodomy, a lewd and lascivious act upon a child under 14, and furnishing a controlled substance to a minor, but he accepted a plea bargain and pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor. Polanski fled from the U.S. in February, 1978, to avoid imprisonment and deportation. In 2018, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences belatedly voted to expel Polanski from its membership because of his conviction and flight from punishment, after awarding him a Best Director Oscar in 2002 for The Pianist.

July 12, 2013 – On her 16th birthday, Malala Yousafzai addressed the United Nations, calling for universal access to education.

July 12, 2018 – Billed as “the most comprehensive study yet” on sexual harassment in the sciences, a report from the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Washington DC confirms that sexual harassment is pervasive throughout academic science in the United States, driving talented researchers out of the field and harming others’ careers. Analysis concludes that policies to fight the problem are ineffective because they are set up to protect institutions, not victims — and that universities, funding agencies, scientific societies and other organizations must take stronger action. “The cumulative effect of sexual harassment is extremely damaging,” said Paula Johnson, president of Wellesley College in Massachusetts and co-chair of the committee that wrote the report. “It’s critical to move beyond the notion of legal compliance to really addressing culture.” T he report found the main mechanism for reporting sexual harassment on US campuses — Title IX, the federal law enacted in 1972 that outlaws discrimination on the basis of gender — has not reduced the incidence of sexual harassment. Institutions find ways to comply with Title IX, avoiding liability without preventing harassment, says Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, a biogeochemist at the University of California, Merced, part of a national team working to train bystanders to intervene when they witness harassment, aiming to better prevent it. The report’s many recommendations include: research institutions should act to reduce the power differential between students and faculty members, perhaps by introducing group-based advising; that the government should prohibit confidentiality in settlement agreements, so that harassers cannot switch jobs without their new employer knowing about past behavior; and that research organizations should treat sexual harassment at least as seriously as research misconduct.

Paula Johnson

July 12, 2019 – Sadie Roberts-Joseph, age 75, founder of the Baton Rouge African American Museum, was discovered dead in the trunk of her car. She was an activist and beloved icon of her community. A man who was her tenant was arrested five days later.

July 12, 2020 – In the UK, the LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall backed a new private member’s bill to add the gender-neutral ‘X’ to passports. The option had already been instituted in Australia, Canada, and Germany. “There are hundreds of thousands of people in the UK who do not identify as exclusively male or female, but the Conservative government still refuses to give them the dignity of recognising their identities. Introducing an ‘X’ gender option on passports is a relatively small change that would make a big difference to so many people’s lives,” said Christine Jardine, the Liberal Democrats’ equalities spokeswoman, who introduced the bill in the Commons on July 14, which is International Non-Binary People’s Day. By 2021, it completed the First Reading stage in the House of Commons, and passed on to the Second Reading stage, the first opportunity for MPs to debate the main principles of the bill. After that, it will go Committee stage, followed by Report stage, and then Third Reading, and then the House votes on whether to approve the bill. In December, 2021, Britain’s Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, rejected the gender-neutral ‘X’ passport, saying it would undermine a legal system built on a clear male-female split. Christie Elan-Cane, who has been trying to get a passport with an ‘X’ instead of an ‘M’ or ‘F’ since 1995, said the case would be appealed to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on the basis of a violation of the right to privacy.

July 12, 2021 – In Edmonton, Canada, a string of verbal and physical attacks, mostly on Black Muslim women, began in December, 2020. In June, 2021, two sisters wearing hijabs were attacked with a knife by a man shouting racial slurs at them. Other Muslim women were threatened or knocked to the ground when out walking or waiting for public transportation, leaving many women afraid to leave their homes. By July, 2021, Edmonton police had responded to five incidents that led to suspects being charged with hate crimes, including a driver who ran over four members of a Muslim family with his car, killing them, in June 2021. But Muslim community advocates say incidents often go unreported. “We had a town hall meeting where many women came out and actually stated that they have previously been attacked with knives,” Dunia Nur, president and co-founder of the African Canadian Civil Engagement Council, said. Women were told to go back to their homes, and have faced a lot of gender-based violence and hate-motivated crimes that they didn’t report. While out shopping, Dunia Nur was told to “speak English” when she was overheard speaking Somali on the phone with her aunt, and the man initially blocked her path when she tried to leave the store to get away from him, but she got past him before it escalated.

Dunia Nur

July 12, 2022 – Ada Limón named the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States by the Librarian of Congress. Author of The Hurting Kind, The Carrying, Bright Dead Things, Sharks in the Rivers, and Lucky Wreck. In 2015, Bright Dead Things was a finalist for the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

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July 13, 1793 – Charlotte Corday stabs Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat in his bathtub. She is tried and executed on July 17. She insisted she carried out the assassination alone, but believing that she had an accomplice who was a lover, her body is autopsied, but they find she was virgo intacta.

Marat painting by David — Charlotte Corday painted by Jean-Jacques Hauer hours before her execution

July 13, 1863 – Margaret Alice Murray born, British archaeologist, anthropologist, folklorist, and feminist. First woman appointed as a lecturer in archaeology in the UK, at London’s University College (1898-1935). Worked closely with Sir Flinders Petrie in Egyptology as his copyist-illustrator and assistant, discovering the Osireion temple at Abydos. Petrie gave her full credit for her work, but she encountered male prejudice from others, and joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), as well as mentoring several promising women students. Wrote books on Egyptology for the general public.

July 13, 1875 – June Etta Downey born, American psychologist; first woman in the U.S. to head an academic department, as founder of the psychology laboratory at the University of Wyoming in 1900. Her work in psychology gained national recognition and led to many changes in the field. Noted for studies of the psychology of aesthetics and related philosophical issues, and personality assessment.

July 13, 1889 – Emma Asson born, Estonian politician, educator, and author, one of first women elected to Estonian parliament, contributed sections on education and gender equality to first constitution of Estonia; wrote the first textbook in Estonian.

July 13, 1910 – Josefina Niggli born in Mexico, playwright, novelist, and screenwriter. Her novels include Mexican Village and Step Down, Elder Brother; moved to U.S. and wrote scripts for “Golden Age” American TV shows.

July 13, 1927 – Simone Veil born, French lawyer, magistrate, and politician; she worked in the Ministry of Justice, then served as the French Minister of Health (1974-1979), where she wrote and championed the 1975 law, called the Veil law, that legalized abortion in France. “ No woman resorts to an abortion with a light heart. One only has to listen to them: it is always a tragedy,” Veil said in a now-famous opening address on November 26, 1974, before a National Assembly almost entirely composed of men. “We can no longer shut our eyes to the 300,000 abortions that each year mutilate the women of this country, trample on its laws and humiliate or traumatise those who undergo them.” It passed in spite of heated debate. There were death threats against Veil, and swastikas spray-painted on her home. She was a member of the European Parliament (1979-1993) and the first woman to be its President (1979-1982). Veil was also a member of the Constitutional Council of France (1998). A Jewish survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen, she lost her parents and a brother in the Holocaust. In 2008, Veil was honored with a seat among the “immortals” – the state-sponsored body which oversees the French language and usage. Her ceremonial sword was engraved with the motto of the French Republic (Liberté, égalité, fraternité), that of the European Union (“United in diversity”), and the five digits tattooed on her forearm at Auschwitz, which she never removed. She died in 2017 at the age of 89.

Jul y 13, 1948 – Catherine Breillat born, French filmmaker and novelist; her second film, Une Vraie Jeune Fille (A Real Young Girl), based on her novel Le Soupirail, was banned after its premiere, until 1999; in 2004, just months after suffering a stroke that partially paralyzed her, Breillat went back to work on her film, Une vieille maîtresse (The Last Mistress), one of three French films officially selected for the 2007 Cannes Film Festival.

Jul y 13, 1959 – Fuziah Salleh born, Malaysian politician; Womens Chief of the People’s Justice Party (PKR - 2002-2022); PKR Vice President (2010-2014); Senator since 2022; Member of Parliament (2008-2022).

Jul y 13, 1961 – Tahira Asif born, Pakistani Muttahida Qaumi Movement politician; Pakistan National Assembly member from 2013 until her assassination in June, 2014, by two armed men, while traveling with her daughter and driver in Lahore. Ataf Hussain, head of MQM, her political party, said the assassins were religious extremists, and that Asif had not been provided with adequate security.

July 13, 1984 – Ida Maria born as Ida Maria Sivertsen, Norwegian musician and songwriter for film, TV, and video games. She has synesthesia, involuntary simultaneous stimulus of two senses – in her case, she sees colors as she hears music. When writing songs, she makes color sheets for all the chords.

Jul y 13, 2003 – A French DGSE (Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure) rescue attempt fails to liberate Columbian Senator Ingrid Betancourt, a French-Columbian political scientist who was the Oxygen Green Party’s candidate for the Columbian presidency in 2002. Betancourt, along with her campaign manager and driver, were kidnapped by FARC (Fuerza Armadas Revolucinarias de Columbia) in February 2002. The failed mission caused a scandal for the French government. Betancourt was finally rescued in July 2008, along with 14 other captives, after several other negotiation and rescue attempts failed.

Jul y 13, 2018 – Just days after disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein pleaded not guilty to new charges of sexual assault, he excused them as an industry-wide problem. “Yes, I did offer them acting jobs in exchange for sex, but so did and still does everyone,” he claimed. “But I never, ever forced myself on a single woman.” Weinstein’s attorney later said that Weinstein “never said” such a thing. Weinstein was accused of wrongdoing by dozens of women, and in May, surrendered to police after being charged with two rape counts and one criminal sexual act against two women. He faced life in prison, but was free on $1 million bail. After convictions for one first-degree criminal sexual act, and third-degree rape, in May 2020, he was sentenced to 23 years in prison. “I’m not going to say these aren’t great people, I had wonderful times with these people, you know,” Weinstein said of his accusers. “It is just I’m totally confused and I think men are confused about all of these issues.”

Jul y 13, 2020 – Merin Oleschuk, a sociologist and Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, wrote an article, cited by the CDC and the NIH, on Covid-19’s effects on the productivity of academic women, showing that the pandemic has disproportionately impacted women scholars. The gender inequalities which hinder women's academic careers are not new; systemic barriers and bias against women, disparities between men's and women's representation in faculty positions, publication rates, citations, recognition, and salaries that regularly favor men over women are well-documented. Women are also far more likely to carry the majority of the burden of caring for children, housework, and caring for the elderly. “Rising care demands created by COVID ‐ 19—specifically those brought on by remote working, a lack of childcare, and the virus’ particular risk to aging populations—are disproportionately incurred by women and impede their ability to work. The starkness of gender differences in productivity and its visibility during this time provokes a rethinking of how faculty will be evaluated for tenure and promotion during the pandemic and beyond it. With or without a vaccine, the effects of this pandemic will reverberate for years to come, both in the physical disruptions brought on by intermittent lockdowns and school and daycare closures, as well as the psychological toll that regular isolation puts on individuals, children, and families ... The COVID ‐ 19 pandemic serves as an opportunity and a provocation to rethink our established ways of evaluating academic success, to acknowledge and ameliorate systemic differences in its enactment. Doing so can help pave a more equitable path forward.” Data from journal submissions, preprint servers, and databases logging the initiation of new research projects shows that the proportion of submissions by STEM women, and especially those solely authored by women, dropped an estimated 19% during the spring of 2020 compared to the same period in 2019. In other academic fields, women authors made up 14.6% of new research submissions in Spring 2020, compared to 20% of submissions in Spring 2019.

Jul y 13, 2020 – The United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a resolution calling on Member States to take immediate and effective action to respond to all forms of violence against women and girls with disabilities, and to support and protect all victims and survivors, by fostering respect for the rights and dignity of persons with disabilities, promoting empowering portrayals of women and girls with disabilities and awareness-raising campaigns of their capabilities and contributions, and ensuring that sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights are fully realized, including for victims and survivors of sexual and gender-based violence.

Jul y 13, 2021 – In the UK, in 1982, Lynda Mann, age 15, was raped and strangled to death. In 1986, Dawn Ashworth, also age 15, was raped, savagely beaten, and strangled. In 1988, their killer was the first man convicted of murder on the basis of DNA evidence after admitting two murders, two rapes, two assaults, and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. He was caught after the world’s first mass screening for DNA, when 5,000 men in three villages were asked to volunteer blood or saliva samples, although he initially evaded justice by getting a colleague to take the test for him. In June, 2021, the Parole Board ruled that the convicted rapist and killer, now age 61, could be released on licence, saying his behaviour in custody had been “positive and had included extensive efforts to help others.” The justice secretary, Robert Buckland, formally asked the Parole Board to reconsider the move on the grounds that there was an arguable case that the decision was “irrational.” On July 13, the Parole Board confirmed its decision, and he was released in September, but was recalled to prison in November after breaching his parole by “approaching young women.”

Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashworth

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July 14, 1795 – Eleanor Anne Porden born, British Romantic poet; her epic poem, Cœur de Lion, or The Third Crusade, was published in 1822. That year, explorer John Franklin proposed to her. She made her acceptance conditional on his acquiescence to her continuing her career as a poet after their marriage. They wed in 1823, and she gave birth to a daughter in 1824, but had already contracted tuberculosis, and the birth accelerated her decline. She insisted her husband not let concern for her health impede his career, and he set off on his second Arctic Land expedition just before she died at age 29 in February 1825.

July 14, 1861 – Kate M. Gordon born, American women’s rights champion, daughter of advocates of equality between the sexes. Gordon was a civic leader and woman’s suffrage campaigner. In 1896, she joined the Portia Club, a New Orleans women’s rights group, and became co-founder with her sister Jean of the Equal Rights Association Club. She was National American Woman Suffrage Association corresponding secretary (1901-1909); campaigned and raised funds for the first Louisiana hospital for the treatment of tuberculosis (1909-1913); organizer of the 1913 Southern States Woman Suffrage Conference, and headed the 1918 Louisiana suffrage campaign, the first statewide effort in the American South.

July 14, 1862 – Florence Bascom born, American geologist; first woman to receive a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University (1893). She had to take her advanced classes inside a screen so male students couldn’t see her. In 1895, she launched the geology department at Bryn Mawr College. Bascom was the first woman to work as a geologist for the U.S. Geological Survey (1896), the first woman to present a paper before the Geological Society of Washington (1901), and the first woman fellow of the Geological Society of America (1924). There wasn’t another woman elected to the society until after 1945. Bascom was an expert in crystallography, mineralogy, and petrography, and known for inventing techniques using microscopic analysis in the study of oil-bearing rocks. Bascom died in 1945 at age 82.

J uly 14, 1868 – Gertrude Bell born, British author, archaeologist, explorer, mapmaker, public administrator, and spy; influential in establishment of Jordan and Iraq; traveled extensively in Greater Syria, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, and Arabia (1892-1913). In 1915, her knowledge of the region and fluent Arabic was tapped by British Army Headquarters in Cairo; during WWI, she was the only woman political officer in the British forces, given the title “Liaison Officer, Correspondent to Cairo,” then “Oriental Secretary.” She witnessed the horrors of the Armenian Genocide, reporting that in Damascus, “Turks sold Armenian women openly in the public market,” and in Ras al-Ain in Northern Syria, “the desert cisterns and caves were filled with corpses.” When the war ended, she was assigned to analyze the Mesopotamian situation – after ten months, she presented an official report entitled “Self Determination in Mesopotamia,” but British Commissioner Arnold Wilson wanted an Arab government “under the influence” of British officials who would have the real power and control. A compromise was reached, mainly due to the British government’s desire to cut costs in the Middle East: the British installed Faisal bin Hussein, a trusted ally who commanded Arab forces with T.E. Lawrence, as the first King of the newly kludged-together nation of Iraq. Bell was an integral part of the Iraqi administration in its infancy, described as “one of the few representatives of His Majesty’s Government remembered by the Arabs with anything resembling affection.”

July 14, 1911 – Gertrude Scharff Goldhaber born in Germany to a Jewish family; German-American physicist, early researcher into nuclear structure and the properties of nuclei. She fled to London in 1935, but lost both her parents in the Holocaust. In 1939, she married American physicist Maurice Goldhaber, and came to the U.S. She was the third woman elected to the National Academy of Sciences (1972).

July 14, 1916 – Muriel Snowden born, social worker and civil rights leader, co-founder with her husband of Freedom House (1949) in Boston, a community organization promoting social justice, and meeting place for Black civil rights activists.

July 14, 1917 – 16 women from National Women’s Party, arrested while picketing the White House demanding universal women’s suffrage, were charged with “obstructing traffic.”

July 14, 1936 – Pema Chödrön born, Buddhist nun, teacher, and author, notable figure in Tibetan Buddhism, possibly the first American woman to become a fully ordained Buddhist nun; notable for No Time to Lose: A Timely Guide to the Way of the Bodhisattva.

July 14, 1946 – Sue Lawley born, veteran English broadcaster; reporter/presenter (1972-1975) then co-anchor (1976-1983) on BBC news magazine Nationwide .

July 14, 1947 – Claudia J. Kennedy born, U.S Army officer; first woman to promoted to three-star general; retired in 2000 after 31 years of military service, in the fields of intelligence and cryptology.

July 14, 1957 – Rawya Ateya takes her seat in Egypt’s National Assembly, the first female parliamentarian in the Arab world.

July 14, 1960 – Jane Goodall begins her 55-year study of the chimpanzees at Gombe Stream Reserve.

July 14, 1960 – Anna Bligh born, Australian politician; leader of the Queensland Labor Party (2007-2012); first woman Premier of Queensland (2007-2012); Member of Queensland Parliament for South Brisbane (1995-2012).

July 14, 1960 – Jane Lynch born, American comedian, actress, and author; member of Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company; played Sue Sylvester in the TV series Glee, and appeared in the films Best in Show, A Mighty Wind, and For Your Consideration. Lynch also performed on Broadway in revivals of Annie and Funny Girl. Wrote and starred in the award-winning play Oh Sister, My Sister, originally produced in 1998, and then was the first production of the Lesbians in Theater program at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center in 2004. Happy Accidents, her autobiography, was published in 2011. In 2021, she married longtime partner Jennifer Cheyne in Santa Barbara, California.

July 14, 1962 – Vanessa Lawrence born, British geographer, public speaker, and first woman Director-General and Chief Executive of Ordnance Survey, Great Britain’s national mapping agency (2000-2014); Honorary Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineering Surveyors, and of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

July 14, 1976 – Kirsten Sheridan born, Irish film director and screenwriter; in 2003, she and her co-authors were nominated for both a Golden Globe and an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for the film In America. Her first feature-length film, Disco Pigs, was released in 2001. She also directed August Rush (2007) and Dollhouse (2012).

July 14, 2013 – An outdoor statue of Rachel Carson by artist David Lewis was dedicated in Waterfront Park in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Carson is best-known for her 1962 book Silent Spring, which documented the harmful effects of indiscriminate use of pesticides. Though fiercely opposed by the chemical companies, the book became a rallying point for the nascent environmental movement, and her warning shaped public opinion, leading to the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act.

July 14, 2018 – Andrea Hernandez, a 23-year-old Oregon woman, survived for a full week after her SUV crashed over a 200-foot cliff on California’s coast. Hernandez on her way to visit her sister when she went missing near Big Sur. Her family filed a missing person report, but she was discovered by hikers. Hernandez suffered a concussion and a shoulder injury, but authorities said she was able to walk and talk when they found her. While awaiting rescue, she used her car’s radiator hose to collect water from a stream to stay alive.

July 14, 2020 – In Joliet, Illinois, over 700 nurses, members of the Illinois Nurses Association were in their second week of a strike at AMITA Health’s Saint Joseph’s Medical Center, demanding safe staffing levels amid the pandemic. The nurse’s union had been in negotiations with AMITA Health since February, and working without a contract since May 9, 2020. The nurses say their demands for better nurse-to-patient ratios have been met with illegal intimidation and threats of termination by management. On July 20, 2020, the nurses approved a new contract. “While a majority of nurses voted for this contract, there are still many nurses who want to see more progress on safe staffing,” Pat Meade, a nurse at the hospital and one of the lead union negotiators, said in a news release. “We will continue the fight for safe staffing through enforcement of our contract and in Springfield.”

July 14, 2021 – In an interview with German broadcaster Deutsche Welle (DW), former U.S. President George W. Bush was asked whether the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO troops from Afghanistan was a mistake. He replied: “You know, I think it is, because I think the consequences are going to be unbelievably bad … I’m afraid Afghan women and girls are going to suffer unspeakable harm.” The war in Afghanistan began under Bush after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the U.S. The Bush administration gave the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, an ultimatum: hand over the al-Qaida leader, Osama bin Laden, and dismantle militant training camps or prepare to be attacked. Omar refused, and a U.S.-led coalition launched an invasion in October 2001.

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July 15, 1793 – Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps born, American educator, editor, and author, wrote about nature, but also published novels, essays, a memoir, and several science textbooks on botany, chemistry, and geology. She had more access to education than most girls of her era, and began teaching at age 16. She opened a boarding school for young women in her home, then become the principal of a school in Sandy Hill, NY. At age 24, she married Simeon Lincoln, and left her career to become a homemaker and the mother of three children, but returned to education after her husband’s untimely death in 1823, as a teacher and vice-principal at the Troy Female Seminary in Troy, NY until 1830. Her sister, Emma Hart Willard was the school’s principal. Almira added to her knowledge of botany, and published a textbook, Familiar Lectures on Botany, in 1829. It went through 17 editions and sold over 275,000 copies by 1872. She married her second husband, John Phelps, in 1831, and left teaching, but continued to write, including textbooks on chemistry, natural philosophy, and education. She and her husband started the Female Institute of Rahway in New Jersey in 1839, but closed it in 1841 when she hired to run the Patapsco Female Institute in Maryland, where she served as principal and teacher until her retirement in 1856. Her husband was the institute’s business manager until his death in 1849. She was the second woman elected as a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science – Maria Mitchell was the first – and continued to write, lecture, and revise her textbooks until her death, on her 91 st birthday, July 15, 1884.

July 15, 1858 – Emmeline Pankhurst born, militant British Woman’s Suffrage leader; founding member of the Women’s Franchise League in 1889, which secured the vote for some married women in local elections, after the 1894 Local Government Act gave some single women the vote in municipal elections. She went on to found the Women’s Social and Political Union, an all-women suffrage organization with the motto, “deeds, not words.” As opposition in Parliament remained intractable, WSPU tactics became increasingly physical; members smashed windows and hit police officers. When arrested and jailed, they went on hunger strikes to secure better conditions, and were brutally force-fed. There was a split in the group when some members began using arson as a weapon, including a rift between Pankhurst and her two younger daughters, which never healed. Pankhurst and her eldest daughter continued on, but called a halt to all militant suffrage tactics with the advent of WWI, and urged women to aid industrial production and support the government. But when the war ended, the 1918 Representation of the People Act granted the vote to all men over the age of 21, and to women over 30, if they also met other requirements not applied to men. There had been so many men lost in the war that universal enfranchisement of women would have made them the majority of voters. Pankhurst turned the WSPU into the Women’s Party, and continued the fight. She died on June 14, 1928, just weeks before the Conservative government’s Representation of the People Act (1928) extended the vote to all women over 21 years of age on July 2, 1928.

July 15, 1864 – Maggie L. Walker born in Richmond, Virginia, daughter of a former slave; African American businesswoman and teacher. After teaching grade school for three years, she married Armstead Walker, a bricklayer, and divided her time between raising a family and charitable work with the Independent Order of St. Luke. In 1902, she was the first African American woman to charter a bank, the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank, and the first Black woman bank president. When the bank merged with other Richmond banks to become the Consolidated Bank and Trust Company, she was chair of its board of directors. In 1914, her husband was mistakenly shot and killed by their son Russell, when the two men were searching for a burglar. Russell Walker was arrested and charged with murder, but declared innocent before it went to trial. He never recovered from the incident, and died an alcoholic at age 33. In her later years, Maggie Walker, disabled by paralysis and using a wheelchair, continued her charitable and banking work. She died at age 70 in 1934. In 1978, her home was designated a National Historic Site, and is now a museum operated by the National Parks Service.

July 15, 1878 – Anna Coleman Ladd born, American sculptor who devoted her time and skills throughout WWI and its aftermath to designing and making facial prosthetics from thin galvanized copper for soldiers who were disfigured by injuries received in combat. The pieces were painted with hard enamel to resemble the recipient's skin tone. She also used human hair to create eyebrows, eyelashes, and mustaches. The prosthesis was attached to the face by strings or eyeglasses. In 1932, the French government awarded her the Ordre national de la Légion d'honneur, the nation’s highest order of merit.

July 15, 1890 – Florence Yoch born, landscape architect in Los Angeles; with her partner Lucille Council, they broke barriers against women professionals in a “man’s field.” Yoch designs attracted a wide clientele, from wealthy patrons in Pasadena to Hollywood’s elite, including Jack Warner, David O. Selznick, George Cukor, and director Dorothy Arzner, who hired Yoch to design a garden set for one of her films. This began Yoch’s work as the first woman landscape architect to design outdoor movie sets, including the garden for Tara in Gone With the Wind, rice paddies for The Good Earth , and a field of spring daffodils for How Green Was My Valley.

July 15, 1899 – Estelle Peck Ishigo born, artist, joined her Japanese-American husband in a Wyoming internment camp during WWII, made sketches of her experience for the War Relocation Authority, and published Lone Heart Mountain in 1972 chronicling her internment. Days of Waiting is a documentary based on her experiences.

Estelle Peck Ishigo — ‘No Privacy for Women’

July 15, 1905 – Dorothy Fields born, American librettist, and lyricist of over 400 songs for Broadway and film musicals, one of the first female Tin Pan Alley songwriters. Known for “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love” "The Way You Look Tonight," "A Fine Romance," "On the Sunny Side of the Street," and "I'm in the Mood for Love."

July 15, 1918 – Brenda Milner born in England, British-Canadian pioneer in clinical neuropsychology, and the study of memory — her research showed the hippocampus had a role in forming memories, a fundamental discovery in neuroscience that launched entire fields of research. Professor in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University, and a professor of Psychology at the Montreal Neurological Institute. She explored interaction between the brain’s left and right hemispheres. Recipient of the 2009 Balzan Prize for Cognitive Neuroscience. On her birthday this year, she will become 105 years old.

July 15, 1919 – Iris Murdoch born in Ireland, British author and philosopher, wrote 26 novels including: The Sea, the Sea (1978 Booker Prize), The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (Whitbread Literary Award for Fiction), and The Black Prince ( James Tait Black Memorial Prize); honored with the 1997 Golden PEN Award for her body of work.

July 15, 1927 – Carmen Zapata born of Mexican and Argentinian parents, American actress and activist; co-founder of the Screen Actors Guild Ethnic Minority Committee in 1972, and co-founder/first president/producer-director of the Bilingual Foundation for the Arts (BFA) in 1973, which produces plays in English and Spanish.

July 15, 1938 – Carmen Callil born, Australian publisher, writer, and critic; founder of Virago Press in 1973, which publishes women authors, and creator of Virago’s Modern Classics list, bringing back into print the best “forgotten” women authors of the past; elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2010, and honoured with their Benson Medal in 2017.

July 15, 1942 – Vivian Malone Jones born, one of two black students to enroll at the University of Alabama in 1963, and the university’s first black graduate. Worked as a research analyst for the civil rights division of the U.S. Department of Justice; after she earned a master’s degree in Public Administration, she was an employee relations specialist at the central office of the U.S. Veteran’s Administration. Jones was appointed as Executive Director of the Voter Education Project, then Director of Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, and was Director of Environmental Justice for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) until her retirement in 1996. She died at age 63 following a stroke in 2005.

July 15, 1943 – Jocelyn Bell Burnell born, Irish astrophysicist, discovered the first four radio pulsars in 1967, when she was still a research student. She noticed an unusual stellar radio signal - a rapid series of pulses repeating every 1.337 sec. This interstellar beacon was not man-made, so it was nicknamed in fun as LGM, for “Little Green Men.” In the next few months, by careful scrutiny of hundreds of feet of pen-recorder paper, she found three more sources of radio pulses. These represented a new class of celestial objects – pulsars – which astronomers eventually associated with superdense matter in the final stage of the evolution of massive stars. To date, hundreds more pulsars have been identified. Burnell was excluded from the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics, given for the discovery to her thesis supervisor Antony Hewish and radio astronomer Martin Ryle. Ryle’s work on aperture-synthesis technique and Hewish’s decisive role in the discovery of pulsars were cited in the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ press release announcing the award. Several prominent astronomers criticized her omission. She became project manager for the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Mauna Kea, Hawaii in 1986; President of the Royal Astronomical Society (2002-2004); Visiting Professor of Astrophysics at Oxford, a Fellow of Mansfield College; President of the Institute of Physics (2008-2010); recipient of Herschel Medal. In 2018, her appointment as Chancellor of the University of Dundee was announced. She is a long-time campaigner for increasing the number and status of women in the fields of astronomy and physics.

July 15, 1950 – Arianna Huffington born in Greece, Greek-American author and syndicated columnist; co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, which was acquired by AOL in 2011 for $315 million USD. She remained as President of the Huffington Post Media Group until 2016, when she left to start Thrive Global.

July 15, 1952 – Jill Long Thompson born, American Democratic politician, educator, and author; President Barack Obama appointed her as board chair and CEO of the Farm Credit Administration (2012-2015); Thompson was Under Secretary of Agriculture for Rural Development (1995-2001); a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Indiana's 4th district (1989-1995). Author of The Character of American Democracy, published in 2020.

July 15, 1957 – Kate Kellaway born in England to Australian parents; journalist and literary critic for The Observer newspaper. A teacher in Zimbabwe (1982-1986) before becoming a critic at the Literary Review in 1987 . At the Observer, she has been a features writer, deputy literary editor, deputy theatre critic, poetry editor, and children's books editor. One of five judges for the Booker Prize in 1995.

July 15, 1979 – Laura Benanti born, American stage actress and singer; nominated five times for Tony Awards, and won the 2008 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for her performance as Louise in the Broadway revival of Gypsy. Also noted for the Broadway musicals Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Swing!, and The Wedding Singer, and a revival of The Sound of Music. Noted for her recurring role as Melania Trump on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

July 15, 1997 – Donatella Versace launches her first couture collection for her brother’s Versace label, a year after his murder.

July 15, 2010 – Same-sex marriage is legalized in Argentina.

July 15, 2013 – Upper house of the UK Parliament approved same sex marriage in England and Wales, beginning in 2014.

July 15, 2020 – Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg underwent an endoscopic procedure at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore to treat a possible infection. The 87-year-old justice was reported to be "resting comfortably and will stay in the hospital for a few days to receive intravenous antibiotic treatment," according to a press release from the court. In May, 2020, she underwent a nonsurgical treatment for a benign gallbladder condition, and participated in oral arguments from her hospital bed.

July 15, 2021 – In Seneca Falls, the Women’s Rights National Historical Park (NHP), due to the Covid-19 Pandemic, held its annual Convention Days virtually for the first time in 2020, and held them again virtually in 2021. Convention Days, a signature event in Seneca Falls for many years, focuses on the 1848 Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention through art, drama, and scholarship. “The Abolition movement is where many women learned how to participate in activism and built the networks they would use to advance their mission for equality in other areas of society.” said Chief of Interpretation & Education, Janine Waller. In 2022, the NHP announced that Convention Days would be held onsite July 15-17, 2022, and other community museums in the area would also hold live events.

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July 16, 1194 – Clare of Assisi born as Chiara Offreduccio; Italian founder of the Catholic order of Poor Ladies, renamed the Order of Saint Clare, but commonly called the Poor Clares. She was an early followers of Saint Frances of Assisi, and based the Rule of Life for her order on his teachings, the first set of monastic guidelines written by a woman. She succeeded in thwarting Popes Innocent III, Honorius III, Gregory IX, and Innocent IV in their attempts to ease her order’s strict rule of poverty, which banned accepting any possessions.

July 16, 1546 – Anne Askew , Protestant English poet, “the Faire Gospeler” (lay preacher, one who had many sections of the Bible memorized) is burned at the stake after being tortured in the Tower of London. One of the earliest known women poets in the English language, and the first Englishwoman to demand a divorce (at age 15, her father married her off to her eldest sister’s fiancée, Thomas Kyme, when her sister died). She was a devout believer in direct prayer to God, without intercession by priests, while her husband was Catholic; she bore two children (who likely died in infancy) before he threw her out, so she moved to London, resumed her maiden name and became a gospeller. Kyme had her arrested for preaching, and dragged back, but she escaped and returned to London, was arrested twice more, and the second time she was tortured in the Tower of London, the only recorded torture of a woman there. Ordered to name like-minded women she refused, then was stretched on the rack, which dislocates joints of wrists, ankles, elbows, knees, shoulders and hips. Askew still refused to renounce her beliefs, and was convicted of heresy. She was martyred in Smithfield, carried in a chair and then bound unto the stake, unable to stand because of the torture she had endured. When she refused again to recant, she was burned to death. Witnesses said she didn't cry out until the flames reached her chest. The “Act for the Advancement of True Religion” in 1543 restricted the reading of the Bible to clerics, noblemen, the gentry, and richer merchants. Women of the gentry and nobility were only allowed to read the Bible in private. Reading the Bible in English was forbidden to "women, artificers, apprentices, journeymen, serving-men of the rank of yeoman and under, husbandmen and laborers."

July 16, 1821 – Mary Baker Eddy born, American founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist, commonly known as Christian Science, and of the Christian Science Monitor newspaper; her book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures , has been a bestseller for decades.

July 16, 1849 – Clara Shortridge Foltz born, attorney and suffragist; first woman lawyer in California, first California female deputy district attorney, and founder of the state’s first public defender system. When she discovered women were excluded from practicing law in California, she drafted an amendment, dubbed the ‘Women Lawyers Bill,’ to the California Code of Procedure, to eliminate both gender and racial discrimination. She joined forces with other feminists in a hard-fought battle to pass it – then refused to leave the Governor’s office until he signed it into law, just seconds before it would have expired. She and fellow suffragist Laura de Force Gordon sued the board of Hastings Law School to gain admission – the lengthy court battle took all her money, and she was never able to attend classes, but practiced law anyway under the amendment she initiated, dubbed the “Portia of the Pacific.”

July 16, 1862 – Ida B. Wells-Barnett born, American journalist, newspaper editor, public speaker, civil rights leader, and feminist, known for extensive documentation of racial lynchings in the U.S. She formed the National Association of Colored Women (1896), and joined the National Equal Rights League, working to get all women the vote. She was also an inspiring speaker who traveled internationally on lecture tours.

July 16, 1863 – Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler born in Austria, American pianist, frequently described by biased critics as a woman who “plays like a man” because she was a virtuoso, with technique and bravura, and a wide range of repertoire. She came to the U.S. with her family at age four, made her professional debut in 1884 with Chicago’s Beethoven Society, followed by a New York debut in 1885, and a series of concerts with the Boston Symphony. She played at the Columbian Exposition of 1893, and went on several successful world tours. In 1925, she founded the Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler Fund to assist musicians in need. She died at age 64 of heart disease.

July 16, 1880 – Emily Stowe becomes the first woman granted a license to practice medicine in Canada by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario. She got her training in the U.S. because she was denied entry into medical school in Toronto. Founder of the Toronto Women’s Literary Club, which became the Canadian Women’s Suffrage Association in 1883. Her daughter, Augusta Stowe-Gullen, became the first woman to earn a medical degree in Canada.

July 16, 1882 – Violette Neatley Anderson born in England, African American lawyer. She graduated from high school, then worked as a court reporter for fifteen years. She attended Chicago Seminar of Sciences (1912-1915), was one of the first women to earn an LLB from Chicago Law School in 1920, and was the first black woman admitted to practice by examination by the state board of examiners. She was the first woman to open her own private practice in Illinois, and became the first woman City Prosecutor for Chicago (1922). In 1926, she was the first African American woman admitted to practice law before the U.S. Supreme Court. In addition to be a prosecuting attorney, she ran a court reporting agency, and became vice-president of the Cook County Bar Association (1930-1926). Her testimony and advocacy were instrumental in the passage of the Bankhead-Jones Act, signed into law by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1937. It was designed to provide low-interest loans to sharecroppers and tenant farmers, enabling them to become farm owners. Neatly Anderson was a member of the Federal Colored Women’s Clubs, and the League of Women Voters.

July 16, 1896 – Evelyn Preer born, African American blues singer, stage and screen actress. She had major roles in over a dozen films made by African-American film pioneer Oscar Micheaux, from her 1919 film debut in The Homesteader, to The Spider’s Web in 1926, in which she played challenging roles as both heroine and villain. Her first talkie was the “race musical” Georgia Rose in 1930. Her last film appearance was as a prostitute in Joseph von Sternberg’s 1932 film Blonde Venus, which starred Marlene Dietrich. Only a few of her films, mostly shorts, have survived. She was also a member of the Lafayette Players, a Chicago theatrical stock company, and appeared on Broadway in David Belasco’s 1926 production of Lulu Belle, and in Rang Tang, a black musical revue, in 1927. She sang in cabaret and musical theatre, and made a recording with Duke Ellington. In April, 1932, she gave birth to her only child, Edeve, but there

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