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Morning Open Thread: Women's History – From a Saint to UK Women Fighting Misogynistic Hate Crimes [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-03-21
March is National Women’s History Month
______________________________________________________
“When I dare to be powerful, to
use my strength in service of my
vision, then it becomes less and less
important whether I am afraid.”
— Audre Lorde,
American writer, civil rights
and women's rights activist
______________________________________________________
“When a woman is assaulted, one of the first questions
people ask is, Did you say no? This question assumes
that the answer was always yes, and that it is her
job to revoke the agreement. To defuse the bomb
she was given. But why are they allowed to touch
us until we physically fight them off? Why is the
door open until we have to slam it shut?”
— Chanel Miller, American writer
who was assaulted by Brock Turner
at Stanford University in January 2015
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Women’s History for March 21st:
1474 – Angela Merici born, Italian founder of the secular Company of Saint Ursula (‘Angelines’) in 1535, consecrated Catholic women dedicated to the education of girls and care of the sick and needy; canonized as a Roman Catholic saint in 1807.
1557 – Anne Dacre Howard born, Countess of Arundel, poet; in 1582, she converted to Roman Catholicism, then was placed under house arrest on Queen Elizabeth I’s orders; after her release in 1584, she influenced her husband, Philip Howard, to also convert; he tried to escape to France, but was caught and held prisoner in the Tower of London. Anne was forbidden to live in London, and Philip died in the Tower in 1595. So Anne, unable to claim his possessions because of Philip’s imprisonment, resorted to selling her land to pay debts and support her children.
1752 – Mary Dixon Kies born, American inventor, who receives one of the first patents given to a woman in May, 1809, which is signed by President James Madison, for a new technique of weaving straw with silk and thread to make hats.
Hat made using Kies patent
1831 – Dorothea Beale born, English suffragist, educational reformer, and author; a graduate of the newly opened Queen’s College, a school for girls aged 11-18, in London. In 1849, she was appointed as mathematics tutor at the college. In 1854, she was head teacher in the prep school for girls aged 4-11 that was attached to the college. In 1857, she became head of the Clergy Daughters' School, but her insistence on the need for reforms led to her resignation a year later. Beale then taught mathematics and Latin at Miss Elwalls School, and compiled her Students' Text-Book of English and General History from B.C. 100 to the Present Time. In 1858, she became principal of Ladies’ College, Cheltenham, spending the rest of her career at Cheltenham. When she began as principal, the school had 69 pupils and only £400 of its original capital remained. For the next two years the college struggled. By 1873, under her leadership, it moved to buildings of its own, which were enlarged three years later, when the school had 310 pupils. By 1912, the school had expanded to house 1,000 pupils and 120 teachers, 14 boarding houses, a secondary and a kindergarten teachers' training department, a library of over 7,000 volumes, and 15 acres of playing-fields. She founded The Cheltenham Ladies' College Magazine, and remained its editor until her death. Dorothea Beale saw that the absence of training for teachers was a main obstacle to improvement. Her campaign led to the establishment of St. Hilda’s, England’s first residential teachers’ training college in 1885. She purchased Cowley House in Oxford in 1892, which became St. Hilda’s Hall of Residence for Women. She was president of the Headmistresses' Association from 1895 to 1897, and was vice-president of the Kensington Society, an early women’s rights discussion group, which organized the first campaigns for woman suffrage, higher education, and women’s property rights. She continued working, in spite of increasing deafness, and signs of cancer, until her death in 1906 at age 75.
1857 – Alice Henry born, Australian suffragist, journalist, and trade unionist who became a leader in the American Women's Trade Union League.
1866 – Antonia Maury born, American astronomer, one of the “Harvard computers,” a group of skilled women workers who processed astronomical data; Maury developed a catalog of stellar spectra, and published a spectroscopic analysis of the binary star Beta Lyrae (1933). She was unappreciated (and really underpaid) by the Harvard observatory director, Edward C. Pickering, but her work was important in Ejnar Hertzsprung's verification of the distinction between dwarf stars and giant stars, as now seen in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. After Pickering discovered the first spectroscopic binary star, Mizar, Maury was the first to measure its period, 104 days. In 1889, she identified the second such star, Beta Aurigae, with a period of about 4 days. Maury was the daughter of John William Draper, a pioneer in using photography in astronomy.
1868 – The Sorosis Club for Professional Women is formed in New York City by Jane Cunningham Croly, who joined the staff of the New York Tribune in 1855, becoming one of the first women to write a syndicated column, but she was refused membership in the male-only New York Press Club. Her new organization was open to professional and wealthy women, not to women who were wage-earners. Croly was also the founder of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs.
20th Century members of the Sorosis Club
1873 – Ellen Glasgow born, prolific American novelist known for her realistic depictions of life in the American South during the early 20th century; her last novel, In This Our Life, won the 1942 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
1887 – Clarice Beckett born, Australian tonalist painter; she faced considerable prejudice from conservative male artists and critics. Beginning in 1919, she could only paint outdoors during the dawn and dusk because she was taking care of her ailing parents. Beckett died at age 48 from pneumonia, after painting the wild sea off Beaumaris, near Melbourne, during a very big storm in 1935.
1897 – Martha Foley born, co-creator of Story magazine in 1932 with her husband Whit Burnett; she also edited the annual Best American Short Stories (1941-1977), which included entries by Eudora Welty, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, and other well-known writers.
1904 – Jehane Benoît born, French Canadian culinary author, commentator, journalist, and broadcaster. After studying at the Sorbonne and the Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris, she started her own cooking school, Fumet de la Vieille France, in Montreal. She also opened one of Canada’s first vegetarian restaurants “The Salad Bar” in 1935. Author of over 30 cookbooks, including the Encyclopedia of Canadian Cuisine, she appeared regularly on Canadian television’s newsmagazine series, Take 30.
1905 – Phyllis McGinley born, American poet and author; recipient of 1961 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Love Letters.
1923 – Nirmala Srivastava born, Indian founder of Sahaja Yoga, a self-awareness meditation movement, and activist for Indian Independence, who was jailed in 1942 during the Quit India Movement.
1928 – Ruth Anderson born, American composer of orchestral and electronic music, orchestrator, and flutist. Noted for her sound poem I Come Out of Your Sleep, based on Louise Bogan’s poem “Little Lobelia.”
1937 – Ann Clwyd born, Welsh Labour Party politician; Member of Parliament for the Cynon Valley since 1984; advocate for human rights and international women’s rights; member of the Royal Commission on the National Health Service (1976-1979). She helped pass the Female Genital Mutilation Bill in 1985, which bans Female Circumcision in the UK and prohibits parents sending/taking their daughters abroad for the procedure.
1942 – Amina Claudine Myers born, American jazz pianist, singer-songwriter, composer, and arranger.
1943 – Cornelia Fort died, American pilot and flight instructor — while on a civilian training flight at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, she became the first U.S. pilot to encounter the Japanese air fleet during the attack on Pearl Harbor. She and her student narrowly escaped a collision with the Japanese aircraft and a strafing attack after making an emergency landing. Fort later became a pilot in the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron. She was killed on this day in a mid-air collision, the first American woman pilot to die while on active duty.
1944 – Gaye Adegbalola born as Gaye Todd, American blues singer, guitarist, and activist; founding member of Saffire – The Uppity Blues Women (1984-2009). She has also released six recordings on her own label, Hot Toddy Music. She grew up in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where she sat-in, picketed, and protested against racism. She graduated as valedictorian from a segregated high school, then went to Boston University, majoring in biology. She was a science teacher in Fredericksburg for 18 years, moonlighting in local clubs before she became a full-time blues singer and musician.
1950 – Elena Firsova born, Russian composer of over 100 compositions; her favorite genre is chamber cantata for solo voice and ensemble, but she has composed orchestral works, and a chamber opera, The Nightingale and the Rose. In 1979 she was blacklisted as one of the "Khrennikov's Seven" at the Sixth Congress of the Union of Soviet Composers for unapproved participation in some festivals of Soviet music in the West.
1962 – Kathy Greenwood born, Canadian comedian and scriptwriter; performer and writer in the Toronto branch of Second City (1988-1992); was a regular cast member of the Canadian television drama Wind at My Back (1996-2001); member of the sketch comedy quintet, Women Fully Clothed.
1962 – Rosie O’Donnell born, American comedian, author, TV producer, and LBGTQ rights activist; host of The Rosie O’Donnell Show (1996-2002), which won five Emmys for Outstanding Talk Show.
1966 – Moa Matthis born, Swedish author and literary critic; she writes historical books, and articles for the Stockholm daily newspaper, Dagens Nyheter (The Day’s News), from a feminist point of view.
1973 – Ananda Lewis born, African American television host and social activist; host of the talk show The Ananda Lewis Show in 2001, which unfortunately never recovered from debuting the day before 9-11; worked on The Insider 2004-2005; she left show business, in part because of a series of problems with stalkers, and is now a carpenter and home renovator; she’s volunteered as a mentor for Youth at Risk, and as a spokesperson for the Humane Society and Reading is Fundamental.
1986 – Debi Thomas became the first African American to win the World Figure Skating Championships, and the first black athlete to win a medal in the Winter Olympics (1988); she later became an orthopedic surgeon specializing in hip and knee replacement, but lost of most of her savings in two divorces and the financial failure of her medical practice in the dying coal-mining town of Richlands, Virginia, and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She sold her Olympic Bronze Medal to help pay some of her debts, but was reported as of early 2021 to still be living precariously.
2019 – The Trump administration denied visas to dozens of women scheduled to attend a United Nations women’s conference. Campaigners say at least 41 women were denied entry to the U.S. to attend the annual Commission on the Status of Women — most of them from nations blacklisted under Trump’s travel ban. The move was a violation of a 70-year-old treaty which obligates the U.S. to allow entry to people attending the United Nations headquarters in New York City. Women from Iran, Sudan, Zimbabwe, and Syria were asked to provide supporting documents like marriage certificates, proof of property ownership, letters stating employment status, proof of finances, proof of birth certificates, or proof showing that they have children.
2020 – Lucy Clarke revealed the online abuse she suffered after appearing with her team on the British quiz programme University Challenge. Many comments were about her appearance: “What a mess, did she get dressed in the dark?” – one man, who identified himself as a “granddad of six, married to my lovely teacher wife” tweeted, “... I’ll guess Clarke sucks like a f*cking Dyson.” She went on: “One tweeted me to tell me how ‘ugly’ I was; another told me that with my teeth I should never laugh again. One bloke spent 24 hours telling me I was getting abuse because of my ‘prattishness’ and lack of ‘feminine charm.’ The reason I was so defective? No ‘heteronormal man’ would want to f*ck me.” She noted that “Women are grossly under-represented on University Challenge: of 28 teams this year, only five were equally gender-balanced, and no team had more than two women. This is no fault of the lovely production team, but down to selection within institutions. After my experience with the social media circus, though, I think there’s another big reason: women don’t apply because being on the show is horrible. Female contestants walk an impossible tightrope. Answer more than a couple of questions, or smile after you get an answer right, and you are arrogant: I became ‘showoff’ and ‘Ol’ bighead.’ In 2009, contestant Gail Trimble was ‘smug’ and ‘cocky’ because she answered more questions correctly than anyone on the show, ever. Quieter female contestants are ‘useless.’ During the 2020 season, Nancy Collinge was targeted: ‘Did they tell Collinge to just sit on the end, be quiet and just try to look pretty?’ Quiet male contestants rarely face this.” After her team won an episode, a man tweeted that she “ought to be launched into the sun”, and “did nothing in the contest, Cashman [her teammate] smashed it.” Lucy Clarke was that match’s highest scorer.
Lucy Clarke (with pink hair) on lower left
2021 – In the UK, the pilot program launched by women in Nottingham, aimed at making misogyny a hate crime, took a big step forward when the government announced that police forces across England and Wales will be required to collect data on crimes apparently motivated by hostility towards women. In 2015, a hate crime commission set up by Nottingham Citizens, allied with the national civil society alliance Citizens UK, held a meeting of community leaders, local officials, and members of the public, in a packed room at Nottingham Trent University. Melanie Jeffs, then manager of Nottingham Women’s Centre, listened to the discussion of different forms of hate that would be examined: racism, homophobia, disability hate crime, and so on, then: “I suddenly found myself saying ‘what about women?’ What about all the things that women experience simply because they are women: being threatened, touched, stalked, whistled and generally made to feel uncomfortable in public spaces. We had learnt to accept this as part and parcel of womanhood – but maybe we didn’t need to? Surely this should be part of the hate crime spectrum too?” In 2016, under then Police Chief Sue Fish, Nottinghamshire became the first force in the UK to record public harassment of women – groping, using explicit language, or taking unwanted photographs – as well as more serious offences like assault – as potential misogyny hate crimes. The force charted the scale of the problem for the first time and tailored their responses. Since the pilot began, reports of harassment increased by 25%, and in the first two years 265 misogyny hate crimes were recorded. Researchers from Nottingham and Nottingham Trent universities in 2018 found that 75% of those who reported incidents had a positive experience, although harassment of women and girls, particularly from black and minority ethnic groups, in public spaces across the city remained endemic, with nine out of 10 respondents either having experienced or witnessed it. Initially belittled as “arrests for wolf-whistling,” Fish was refreshingly blunt when she first spoke to the Guardian about the pilot in 2016. “Some trivialise it and say: ‘Oh, so I can’t chat up a woman now.’ But I think there’s a significant difference between ‘Can I buy you a drink?’ and ‘Do you want some cock?’ This is about the unacceptable abuse of women because they are women and it has to stop.” There was training for over 2,000 officers and call handlers, much of it done by Martha Jephcott, cofounder of the women’s group Love and Power: “I remember I made a slide of all the different things women did to make themselves safe, walking in the middle of the road, keys through the knuckles; obviously the people I was training were predominantly men and at the beginning it was so obvious to me, but I had to get them to see it.” By August 2016, ‘Mel’ Jeffs, the woman who spoke up at the first meeting, had received hundreds of threatening messages and derogatory remarks about her appearance on Twitter and Facebook. Jeff said she “brushed off” most of the messages, but “There is one that I’m having discussions with the police about … People think it’s completely acceptable to target women this way.” Nottinghamshire Police said, “We will be speaking to one of the perpetrators to reiterate the seriousness of their actions.” Reflecting on the scheme in 2021, Fish remembers women saying they felt proud to be from Nottingham. “What we heard in feedback from women’s centre was that women walked taller, they had their heads held high, their shoulders back, it was very physical. As opposed to what we’ve heard very viscerally [since Sarah Everard was killed by a police officer in early March 2021] about how women make themselves smaller and less visible.”
[END]
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