“If you’re a Black artist, you could paint aKara Walker , Black American
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WOW2 is a four-times-a-month sister blog to This Week in the War on Women . This edition covers stories from November 24 through November 30.
The next installment of WOW2 will be on Saturday, December 3, 2022.
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“Flags are bits of colored clothArundhati Roy , Indian author,
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“This knotted dilemma lies at the center of women's development. How can girls both enter and stay outside of, be educated in and then try to change, what for millennia has been a man's world?” ― Carol Gilligan , In a Different Voice
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The purpose of WOW2 is to learn about and honor women of achievement, including many who’ve been ignored or marginalized in most of the history books, and to mark moments in women’s history. It also serves as a reference archive of 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 , W OW2’s Librarian Emeritus.
Trailblazing Women and Events in Our History
Note: All images and audios are below
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November 24, 1429 – Jeanne d’Arc (Joan of Arc), with the military commander Charles I d'Albret, under orders from Charles VII of France, takes part in the unsuccessful siege of La Charité, a town in east central France which had been seized by the warlord Perrinet Gressard. The weather was terrible, and the town well-supplied with food, while their troops were short of both supplies and artillery. The siege was abandoned on Christmas Day, 1429.
November 24, 1724 – Maria Amalia of Saxony born; became Queen consort of Naples and Sicily (1738-1759) when she married Charles, King of Naples and Sicily, who later became Charles III of Spain, and she became Queen consort of Spain (1759-1760). Theirs was a successful marriage, and she was quite influential in politics and matters of state, especially after the birth of her son Felipe in 1747, when she was given a seat on the council of state. She carried on her duties in spite of frequent illnesses, probably related to her 13 pregnancies. Six of the children died in childhood, and one was diagnosed as an imbecile. Her seventh child became Charles IV of Spain. In September 1760, Maria Amalia died suddenly in Spain, at age 35.
November 24, 1815 – Grace Darling born, English lighthouse keeper’s daughter who helped rescue nine people from the 1838 shipwreck of the Forfarshire paddlesteamer, which broke in two almost immediately when it hit the rocks. The sea was too rough for the nearest lifeboat to reach the steamer in time, so she rowed out with her father in the lee of the lighthouse’s island, leaving a shorter distance to travel in the turbulent water, then held the small rowboat steady while her father helped four men and a woman into the boat. They returned to the lighthouse, and three of the rescued men went back with her father to rescue four more survivors. The lifeboat didn’t reach the wreck until after the Darling boat had returned a second time to the lighthouse, and the would-be rescuers found only bodies. A return to their base across the open sea was too dangerous, so the lifeboat crew rowed to the lighthouse. The storm was so violent that the survivors and the lifeboat crew all had to stay at the lighthouse for three days. Fifty-three people aboard the Forfarshire lost their lives, including the two children of Mrs. Sarah Dawson, the sole woman survivor. The newspapers lauded Grace’s courage, and she became a national heroine. Grace and her father were awarded the Silver Medal for Bravery by the Royal National Institution for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck. Grace Darling later fell ill, and died of consumption at age 26 in 1842.
Grace Darling — by Thomas Musgrave Joy
November 24, 1849 – Frances Hodgson Burnett born, English-American novelist, playwright, and children’s author; best known for The Secret Garden, A Little Princess, and Little Lord Fauntleroy. Her father died when she was three years old, and her family emigrated to American in 1865 to join her uncle’s family in Tennessee, but he was in the cotton trade, and soon was not able to offer his sister much financial assistance. In spite of her limited education, by age 18, Frances was selling stories to magazines, and earned enough by writing incessantly to move her family into a small house of their own by 1869. Her mother died in 1870, and within two years her siblings married. She married Swan Burnett, a medical student, in 1873, and they had two children. Though she wrote a number of novels for adults, and several plays, it was her books for children which gave her enduring fame. In 1888, she won a lawsuit in England over the dramatic rights to Little Lord Fauntleroy, establishing a precedent that was incorporated into British copyright law in 1911. In response to a second incident of pirating her material into a dramatic piece, she wrote The Real Little Lord Fauntleroy, which was produced on stage in London and on Broadway. The play went on to make her as much money as the book.
November 24, 1858 – Marie Bashkirtseff born, to a wealthy Russian noble family; painter, sculptor, and “tell all” diarist. As a child, she traveled with her mother through most of Europe, spending longer periods of time in Germany and on the Riviera, until the family settled in Paris. She studied painting in France at the Robert-Fleury studio and at the Académie Julian. The Académie was one of the few establishments that accepted women students at that time. Bashkirtseff exhibited at the Paris Salon as early as 1880 and every year thereafter except 1883. In 1884, she exhibited a portrait of Paris slum children entitled The Meeting and a pastel portrait of her cousin, for which she received an honorable mention. After she contracted tuberculosis, she wrote several articles for Hubertine Auclert’s feminist newspaper La Citoyenne
‘Self-Portrait’ — by Marie Bashkirtseff
November 24, 1877 – Anna Sewell’s only novel, Black Beauty , is published, just five months before Sewell’s death. It was an immediate success, becoming one of the best-selling books of all time. The sympathies which the book aroused in its readers led to anti-cruelty legislation in the UK and America. Ironically, the book was banned by the apartheid regime in South Africa due to the words “Black” and “Beauty” being together, because of the ‘Black is Beautiful’ campaign led by Black Consciousness founder Steve Biko.
November 24, 1886 – Margaret C. Anderson born, American founder, publisher, and editor of The Little Review Ulysses.
November 24, 1895 – Esther Applin born, American geologist and paleontologist; a leader in the use of microfossils to determine the age of rock formation, crucial to successful drilling operations in the oil industry, in the Gulf of Mexico region in particular. Her considerable contributions to micropaleontology greatly increased respect for women in the geological field. In spite of skepticism and even ridicule from the established men in her field when she first presented her ideas in 1921, her work for the Rio Bravo Oil Company (1920-1927) proved the effectiveness of her theory in finding the best oil bearing stratigraphic layers. Her discoveries became essential to drilling operation, and were the irreplaceable until electric logs became feasible in the 1950s. After leaving Rio Bravo, she worked as a consultant to other oil companies (1927-1944), then went to work for the U.S. Geological Survey (1944-1962) until her retirement.
November 24, 1910 Lucy Friedlander born , tribal leader and political activist; saved Washington State Colville Indian Reservation by working to defeat a federal “termination bill”
November 24, 1914 Bessie Blount Griffin born, American physical therapist, inventor, and forensic scientist; created an apparatus during WWII to help amputees feed themselves, which led to her invention in 1951 of an electronic feeding device; as a forensic scientist, she worked for law enforcement in Norfolk VA, then became the chief document examiner for the Portsmouth VA police. In 1977, she trained in England at Scotland Yard, then became the first African-American woman to work there. In the 1990s, she was an independent consultant, studying slave papers and Civil War documents as well as verifying the authenticity of documents containing Native American-U.S. treaties, before retiring at age 83.
November 24, 1921 Yoshiko Uchida born, American author; American Library Association Notable Book citation for Journey to Topaz. Her autobiography The Invisible Thread, published in 1991, chronicles her childhood and the years she and her family spent in a WWII concentration camp for Japanese-Americans.
November 24, 1927 – Emma Lou Diemer born, American contemporary classical composer and organist; in addition to many works for organ and piano, she also composed orchestral, choral, and chamber music. Known for Santa Barbara Overture, Songs for the Earth, and Fantasy for Carillon.
November 24, 1943 – Margaret E. Mayo Tolbert born, American biochemist, professor, and the first woman director of the Carver Research Foundation at Tuskegee University (1979-1987). She was also an administrative chemist at British Petroleum, and was part of the transition planning for its merger with Standard Oil of Ohio (1987-1993). Served as director of the New Brunswick Laboratory (1996-2002), the first African American and first woman in charge of a Department of Energy laboratory. Her study of signal transduction in liver cells was among the first to discover the rapid effects of ligands that did not involve RNA or protein synthesis and occur by some intracellular messenger other than cyclic AMP. Author of Resilience in the Face of Adversity.
November 24, 1949 – Dame Sally Davies born, British physician, haematologist, and expert on sickle cell disease; Chief Medical Officer of England since 2010 (the most senior doctor in the English Civil Service, equivalent in rank to Permanent Secretary).
November 24, 1952 – Parveen Shakir born, Urdu poet and Pakistani civil servant; published six collections of poetry, often using the Urdu first-person, feminine pronoun in her verses which, though common in prose, was rarely used in poetry, even by female poets, before her; recipient of Pakistan’s distinguished Pride of Performance award for outstanding contributions to literature in 1976; killed at age 42 in a car accident in 1994.
November 24, 1954 – Margaret Wetherell born, prominent British academic in the field of discourse analysis; co-author of Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour
November 24, 1955 – Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth born, Swedish politician, Member of the Moderate Party; Minister for Culture and Sports (2006-2014); Member of the Swedish Riksdag for Stockholm Municipality (2002-2014); advocate for increased funding for gender studies, and outspoken opponent of graffiti vandalism.
November 24, 1958 – Margaret P. Curran born, Scottish Labour politician; elected in 1999 to the new Scottish Parliament; Minister for Parliamentary Business (2004-2007); Minister for Communities (2003-2003); Minister for Social Justice (2002-2003); Member of Parliament for Glasgow East (2010-2015), for Glasgow Baillieston (1999-2010).
November 24, 1961 – Arundhati Roy born, Indian author and screenwriter; noted for her best-selling novel, The God of Small Things, which won the 1997 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, and her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, which was a 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; she wrote a television serial, The Banyan Tree, and the documentary DAM/AGE: A Film with Arundhati Roy in 2002; she is also a political activist for human rights and the environment.
November 24, 1976 – Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha born in England of Iraqi parents who were scientists and dissidents who fled during Saddam Hussein’s regime. She is a pediatrician, professor, and public health advocate whose research exposed the Flint water crisis . She is commonly referred to as “Dr. Mona.” Her research revealed children were exposed to dangerous levels of lead in Flint, Michigan. Dr. Hanna-Attisha’s findings were initially ridiculed by the State of Michigan, when a Michigan Department of Environmental Quality spokesperson accused her of being an “unfortunate researcher” “splicing and dicing numbers” who was causing “near hysteria.” About ten days later, after The Detroit Free Press What the Eyes Don’t See. ,
November 24, 2012 – Indian workers from Bangalore, Gugaon, and Tirupur who make clothes that end up in the biggest name stores on high streets in Britain testified before a human rights tribunal to a shocking regime of abuse, threats, and pay so low that an entire month’s wages would not buy a single item they produce. The work force, made up mostly of women, have often been cheated out of the full amount of their meager pay. Women workers who fail to meet impossible production targets say they are berated, called ‘dogs and donkeys’ and told to ‘go and die.’
November 24, 2019 – Over 10,000 people marched in Rome during the weekend before International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women . They heard stories told by family members of victims of femicide, the murder of women because they are women. Sara Di Pietrantonio was 22 when she was strangled and burned to death by an ex-boyfriend who could not accept that the relationship was over. Her smoldering body was found at the side of a road in the outskirts of Rome by her mother, Concetta Raccuia. The police officer leading the case said Di Pietrantonio’s murder in June 2016 was the most heinous crime he had ever seen. Four months later, Stefania Formicola, 28, was shot dead in Naples by the husband she was trying to leave. Her two sons are being cared for by their grandmother, Adriana Formicola. In spite of efforts being made to stop the violence, official figures just released showed 142 women in Italy were murdered in 2018, up from 123 in 2017. Feminists campaigning for change say tougher femicide laws, and more funding for women’s shelters, are badly needed.
Violence Against Women poster - Women protest against violence in Rome — Nigeria — and Myanmar
November 24, 2020 – Amnesty International declared that any compromise on women’s rights in a peace deal between the Afghan government and the Taliban would betray 20 years of hard-won progress for Afghan women. Amnesty then launched a new campaign highlighting the incredible work of women’s and human rights defenders in Afghanistan. Samira Hamidi , head of Amnesty International’s Afghanistan campaign, expressed her concern, “Having spent two decades fighting hard to win their most basic rights, Afghan women now face the real possibility of seeing these gains bargained away. The advances made on women’s rights must not be rolled back in this peace process – the human rights of all Afghans, especially women and girls, must be at the heart of any eventual agreement.” Previously, under the Taliban, women and girls were denied a whole range of human rights, including the rights to education, health, free movement, and political and social participation. Since the Taliban regime ended in 2001, important strides were made in women’s rights. There were 3.3 million girls getting an education, and women were politically, economically, and socially engaged. Despite ongoing conflict, Afghan women became lawyers, doctors, judges, teachers, engineers, athletes, activists, politicians, journalists, bureaucrats, business owners, police officers, and members of the military. But major challenges remained, including a high level of violence against women, and over 2 million Afghan girls who were still not in school, according to UNICEF. Since the Taliban regained control of the country in September 2021, the situation for women has again deteriorated, the economy is crippled, banks are closed, there is a drought, a food crisis, and the Taliban have not yet made clear how they are going to address these issues, or what rights women will have under their version of Islamic Law.
Samira Hamidi
November 24, 2021 – UN Women released a report, “Measuring the Shadow Pandemic: Violence against women during COVID-19” which highlights the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on women’s safety at home and in public spaces. The report shows that women’s feelings of safety have been eroded, leading to significant negative impacts on their mental and emotional well-being. The report comes as the world kicks off the annual 16 Days of Activism against Gender Based Violence, from November 25th to December 10th . UN Women Executive Director Sima Bahous .
Sima Bahous of UN Women
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November 25, 1454 – Queen Caterina Cornaro born, last monarch of the Kingdom of Cyprus (reign 1474-1489); she had no heir, so she was pressured into ceding her rights as ruler of Cyprus to the Doge of Venice.
November 25, 1715 – Sybilla Thomas Masters , American inventor, becomes the first American colonist to be granted an English patent (under her husband’s name), for cleaning and curing maize (Indian corn): Letters patent to Thomas Masters, of Pennsylvania, Planter, his Execrs., Amrs. and Assignees, of the sole Vse and Benefit of ‘A new Invention found out by Sybilla, his wife, for cleaning and curing the Indian Corn, growing in the several Colonies of America, within England, Wales, and Town of Berwick upon Tweed, and the Colonies of America.’
Drawing of parts of Sybilla Thomas Masters’ invention
November 25, 1778 – Mary Anne Schimmelpennick born, British author and abolitionist; ‘Narrative of the Demolition of the Monastery of Port Royal des Champs’ ‘Theory on the Classification of Beauty and Deformity.’
November 25, 1846 Carrie Nation born, American radical temperance advocate, famous for demolishing barrooms with a hatchet. Her first husband had died of alcoholism just four years after they married. She was also an advocate for abolishing the corset, because of its harmful effect on vital organs, and refused to wear one. Between 1900 and 1910, she was arrested some 30 times for what she called "hatchetations." In 1901, she founded a shelter for wives and children of alcoholics in Kansas City, Missouri, an early model for battered women’s shelters. Nation was also an advocate for woman suffrage, so women could vote to made liquor illegal.
November 25, 1848 – Katherine Görtler Walker born in Germany; American lighthouse keeper. She tended the Robbins Reef Light in New York Harbor for over 30 years after the death of her husband, Captain John Walker, a retired sea captain who had been appointed keeper of the light in 1885. Katherine Walker became the official keeper of the light in 1890, four years after her husband's death, even though she had been working for $350 in annual wages as assistant keeper while her husband was alive and had proven herself capable of the required work. It was only after multiple men had declined the job that she was offered the keeper position for $600 a year. Once a year, a lighthouse official came to the lighthouse to deliver tons of coal, barrels of oil, and an envelope containing her wages. Aside from this visit, Walker was left alone. She rarely left the station other than to row her children back and forth to school. Her son Jacob became the assistant keeper. The light was lit each night immediately after gunfire from Governors Island signaled sunset. Until dawn, the light would shine every six seconds. On a clear night it could be seen 12 miles away. If the night was foggy, Walker started an engine in the basement that sent out loud siren blasts at three second intervals. Walker and her son got no sleep on foggy nights. If the siren malfunctioned, Walker manually hammered on a bell at the top of the tower, a signal to the mainland that the siren was in need of repair, and officials came as soon as weather permitted. She also kept detailed notes regarding her duties, submitted to the government each month. During her tenure she rescued 50 or more sailors from shipwrecks. In 2019, New York City announced that a statue of Walker will be erected at the St. George Terminal of the Staten Island Ferry, as part of the SheBuiltNYC initiative to honor the contributions of women to the city of New York. Of the 150 statues in NYC as of 2019, only five of them are of women.
November 25, 1865 – Kate Gleason born, first woman enrolled to study engineering at Cornell University, first woman elected to full membership in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, philanthropist and suffragist, friend of Susan B. Anthony; left much of her estate for libraries and parks in her hometown of Rochester NY, and to the Rochester Institute of Technology, which named its college of engineering for her.
November 25, 1880 – Elsie Oxenham , born Elsie J. Dunkerly, author of books for girls and young women, who published 87 titles, 38 of them in her Abbey
November 25, 1895 – Helen Hooven Santmyer born, American novelist and librarian; active in the struggle for women’s rights as a Wellesley student; earned a B.A. in Literature from Oxford University for her thesis on 17th century women writers, and wrote poetry and two novels, but then focused on earning a living, in positions as an educator and librarian until her retirement in 1959; best known for "... And Ladies of the Club"
November 25, 1900 – Helen Gahagan Douglas ; She, Tosca
November 25, 1905 – Samiha Ayverdi born, Turkish author and Sufi mystic; noted for her novels and short story collections, including Aşk Bu İmiş, Mabette Bir Gece, Batmayan Gün.
November 25, 1906 – Alice Ambrose born, American philosopher, logician, and author; professor at Smith College (1937-1972, when she became Professor Emeritus); editor of the Journal of Symbolic Logic (1953-1968), and co-author with her husband, Morris Lazerowitz, of Fundamentals of Symbolic Logic, and several other works.
November 25, 1916 – Peg Lynch born, American actress, producer, and scriptwriter; first woman to create, write, own, and star in her own radio and TV sitcoms, Ethel and Albert, The Couple Next Door, and The Little Things in Life. She retained ownership throughout her life, and wrote nearly 11,000 scripts.
November 25, 1924 – Sybil Bailey Stockdale born, became an activist when her husband, a U.S. Navy pilot, became a prisoner of war during Vietnam, co-founding the National League of Families, a nonprofit organization working on behalf of the families of Missing in Action and POW members of the U.S. military; awarded the Navy Distinguished Public Service Award, the highest honor given by the U.S. Department of the Navy to a civilian not employed by the department.
November 25, 1928Etta Jones born, American jazz singer. She sang with the Earl Hines sextet (1949-1952). She was nominated three times for Grammy Awards. In 2008, her 1960 album, Don’t Go to Strangers, was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
November 25, 1929Judy Crichton born as Judith Feiner, American television news and documentary producer; the first woman producer for CBS Reports, ABC Close-Up, Oh, Tell the World What Happened, American Experience
November 25, 1936 – Trisha Brown born, American choreographer and dancer, co-founder of the Judson Dance Theatre, and a pioneer in the postmodern dance movement.
November 25, 1936 – Phoebe S. Leboy born, American biochemist and advocate for women in science; her work on nucleic acid modifications and bone-forming adult stem cells placed her at the forefront of epigenetics and regenerative medicine. She was active in the Association of Women in Science, and served as AWIS President (2008-2009).
November 25, 1945 – Gail Collins born, American journalist and political columnist at the New York Times New York Times
November 25, 1950 – Alexis Wright born, Indigenous Australian author and land rights activist of the Waanyi people; noted for her novels, Plains of Promise Carpentaria Tracker,
November 25, 1951 – Charlaine Harris born, American mystery and urban fantasy novelist; known for her Aurora Teagarden and Sookie Stackhouse series.
November 25, 1952 – Agatha Christie's murder-mystery play The Mousetrap
November 25, 1952 – Crescent Dragonwagon born (birthname Ellen Zolotow), prolific American fiction writer and cookbook author; co-founder of the Writer’s Colony at Dairy Hollow in Arkansas; her book, Half a Moon and One Whole Star,
November 25, 1955 – Connie Palmen born, Dutch author; noted for her novels De wetten (The Laws), De vriendschap (The Friendship), Jij zegt het (If You Say So),
November 25, 1958 – Naomi Oreskes born, American science historian; Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University since 2013. She has also worked on studies of geophysics, and environmental issues like global warming. In 2010, Oreskes co-authored Merchants of Doubt which identified some parallels between the climate change debate and earlier public controversies, notably the tobacco industry's campaign to obscure the link between smoking and serious disease.
November 25, 1960 – “Las Mariposas” (the butterflies) – three of the four Mirabal sisters, Patria, Minerva and Maria Teresa, leaders of the Movement of the 14th of June opposing Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo’s regime are assassinated , making them martyrs to both the populist and feminist causes. (See 1981 and 1999 entries).
November 25, 1968 – Jacqueline Hennessy born, Canadian journalist and television host of the current affairs program Medical Intelligence. She is Chatelaine Châtelaine.)
November 25, 1971 – Christina Applegate born, American actress who made her first appearance as a baby, and co-starred in the sitcom Married … with Children (1987-1997) before transitioning to a successful film and television career as an adult. She played the title character in the TV series Jesse (1998-2000). Her film credits include The Big Hit, The Sweetest Thing, Hall Pass, Vacation, and Crash Pad. Applegate won a Primetime Emmy as guest actress on Friends in 2003, four nominations for Golden Globes, and a nomination for a Tony Award. She has also been an active supporter of Adopt-A-Classroom, World Animal Protection, The Trevor Project (suicide prevention), and founded Right Action for Women, which focuses on the type of MRI scans for breast cancer screening that discovered her breast cancer in the early stages in 2004. In 2021, Applegate announced that she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. She used a walking stick in October 2022 when she made her first public appearance after being diagnosed with MS.
November 25, 1981 – The Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) , an international treaty adopted by the United Nations General Assembly, goes into force. 189 states have ratified, but several countries signed subject to certain declarations, reservations, and objections. U. S. has signed, but not ratified the treaty. The Holy See, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, and Tonga are not signatories to CEDAW (see also 1999 entry).
November 25, 1986 – Amber Hagerman born, a nine-year-old American kidnapping and murder victim in 1996 – the AMBER Alert (America’s Missing Broadcast Emergency Response) which is now used in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and 33 countries was inspired by her death. The AMBER Alert is estimated to have saved the lives of over 1,000 children to date, but Amber Hagerman’s case remains unsolved.
November 25, 1999 – On the anniversary of CEDAW, the U.N. General Assembly recognizes and supports the campaign started in the Dominican Republic to honor “Las Mariposas” (the butterflies), the three Mirabal sisters , who were political activists ordered killed by dictator Rafael Trujillo in 1960, which has grown into an international campaign to stop violence against women. The General Assembly designates November 25 as International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women , the first day of the U.N. campaign “16 Days of Activism” leading up to Human Rights Day.
November 25, 2019 – Thomas Haythe, age 60, was ousted from his Park Avenue law firm, Tory Haythe, after being charged with sexual harassment by several women lawyers . His firm, Haythe and Curly, had recently merged with the Canadian firm Tory, Tory, DesLauriers & Binnington, and a number of members of both firms were out celebrating. After several jaw-dropping eyewitness accounts exposed Haythe’s misconduct, he agreed to resign immediately. Karen Malatest, a partner with Tory, Tory, DesLauriers & Binnington for 17 years, told Toronto’s Globe & Mail newspaper: “I feel absolutely terrible. I’m extremely upset ... We’re all shocked and appalled at the behavior exhibited.”
November 25, 2020 – There were large demonstrations for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women . A UN spokesperson said violence against women and girls is one of the "most widespread, persistent and devastating human rights violations in our world today" and remains largely unreported because of issues including impunity and stigma. Protests were organized in Central and South America, across Europe, and in Sudan. In Mexico City, marchers called for authorities to do more to combat Mexico’s high rates of femicide and rape. Security forces clashed with some of the women, and some monuments were vandalized. Other large protests were held across Central and South America. In Chile, demonstrators marched with red hands painted over their mouths as they called for more action. Women in Argentina adopted a similar tactic, covering their mouths with purple painted hands as they gathered in front of the National Congress in Buenos Aires. Women and men in Uruguay's capital Montevideo wore black as they marched against gender-based violence. In Honduras, demonstrators hung stuffed animals from ropes in memory of murdered women. Women lay under sheets covered in fake blood in Panama City to represent those killed as a result of femicide. Women in Nance wrote "stop" and "138" on their hands, the number of women reported killed by current or former partners in France in 2020. In Italy, the Senate building in Turin, known as Palazzo Madama, was lit up in red to mark the day. Thousands marched in cities across Spain, and large crowds marched in Istanbul, where there were clashes with riot police. The Istanbul-based group We Will Stop Femicide says 300 women were killed in Turkey so far in 2019. In Brussels, shoes painted red were placed on the ground to symbolize victims of femicide. Women in Sudan joined the global action, chanting "freedom, peace, justice" as they made their way through Khartoum's Burri district.
International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women 2020 demonstration in Santiago Chile
November 25, 2020 – Saudi Arabia moved the trial of activist Loujain al-Hathloul to a special court that handles terrorism cases, a move condemned by human rights campaigners as a heavy-handed attempt to muzzle dissent. Hathloul had already been in jail without trial for over 900 days. Her family said she looked weak and unwell at a rare court appearance, her body shaking and her voice faint. She appeared with three other women who were also arrested in 2018, shortly before the government dropped its longstanding ban on women driving. Hathloul had been a prominent face of the grassroots campaign for women driving. The court appearance came just after Saudi Arabia wrapped up its role as virtual host of the 2020 G20 summit, which had women’s empowerment as one of its themes. Her trial was to begin on November 25, but the judge’s decision to hand over her case to the “specialised criminal court” meant further delays, and represented an escalation of the state’s case against her. It is unclear if the cases of the other women in the dock have also been moved. “We’re very concerned about the use of this court, because it is supposed to look into cases of terrorism. It is not the place to try peaceful human rights activists such as Loujain al-Hathloul,” said Hashem Hashem, regional campaigner for Amnesty International. “We are concerned that this transfer is to further muzzle peaceful and critical voices and to punish activists such as Loujain for demanding change and reform.” The charges against Hathloul are almost entirely related to her campaigning. Offences include speaking to journalists, diplomats, and international activist groups, say sources who saw the charge sheets, which were not made public.
Loujain al-Hathloul before her detention — two years later
November 25, 2021 – Since 2015, nearly six million people have fled from Venezuela , a staggering 20% of the country’s population, because of massive human rights violations, including crisis-level food shortages, lack of healthcare, brutal suppression of protests, and covert detention centers where detainees face torture and sexual violence perpetrated by state intelligence agencies. But for many women and girls fleeing from Venezuela, reaching another country doesn’t make them any safer. In Peru, one of the main host countries taking in the refugees, Amnesty International reports that migrant and refugee women face gender-based violence and discrimination on a daily basis, which is often reinforced by having an irregular migratory status, including pending asylum claims that seem endlessly stalled. Having interviewed survivors of gender-based violence, human rights defenders and public authorities, Amnesty confirmed that Venezuelan women suffer harassment at the workplace, on the streets and in educational centers; sexual blackmail to sustain jobs or homes; physical and psychological abuse; and a constant fear of being returned to Venezuela. Andrea Pardo from Movimiento Manuela Ramos , a civil society organization that has been defending and promoting women’s rights in Peru for 40 years, explains that the difficulties faced by Peruvian women in filing a sexual harassment or assault complaint are compounded by other obstacles faced by women who are foreign nationals: “If the state does not work for nationals, it is even more difficult for foreigners. Added to this is the revictimization of women and the xenophobic component in some of those responsible for the administration of justice. The system needs to change.”
logos of Movimiento Manuela Ramos and Amnesty International — Venezuelan refugees
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November 26, 783 – Queen Adosinda , Kingdom of Asturias (now an autonomous community in NW Spain), had not given Asturia an heir before her husband died, so her nephew Alfonso II had been proclaimed king. Mauregatus, the illegitimate son of Alfonso I, usurps the throne by force and drives Alfonso II into exile in Álava in Basque territory. Fearing her popularity with the people, Mauregatus sends Queen Adosinda to the monastery of San Juan de Pravia, where she is held until she dies.
November 26, 1792 – Sarah Grimké born, abolitionist, women’s rights pioneer, and author, noted for “Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States” (1836), which refuted Biblical scripture justifying slavery, and “Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, and the Condition of Woman” (1838). As a writer, her strong, original arguments against slavery and in support of women’s rights helped advance both movements. She and her sister Angelina, who was 12 years younger, were born into a wealthy family of slave holders in Charleston, South Carolina. Their education was that of girls of their social class in painting, sewing, and music, but their older brother Thomas, a student at Yale, taught Sarah Latin, Greek, mathematics, and geography, and she in turn taught Angelina. Their father, a strict disciplinarian, required all his children to do some work in the fields shelling corn and picking cotton. Sarah later said, “Perhaps I am indebted partially to this for my life-long detestation of slavery, as it brought me in close contact with these unpaid toilers.” In 1819 Sarah went with her father, who was ill, to Philadelphia, where she became acquainted with members of the Society of Friends. The Quakers helped her care for her father, who was dying, and she quickly embraced Quaker beliefs, which strengthened her opposition to slavery. She converted to Quakerism, and moved to Philadelphia in 1821. Angelina became a Quaker in 1829, and joined her sister. They later moved to Massachusetts. Their anti-slavery pamphlets were burned in the South, and they were warned they would be arrested if they ever came back to South Carolina, but they also shocked Northerners with their outspoken ideas and the public speeches they were making, giving their eye-witness accounts of slavery, and speaking of the inequality of American women. The General Association of Congregational Ministers of Massachusetts wrote a public statement condemning the Grimké sisters for giving speeches in front of audiences shockingly composed of both men and women. The sisters continued speaking and writing. Their next booklets addressed women’s rights and the obligation they felt that women had to help end the slavery of black people. They supported the Union and President Lincoln during the Civil War, and gave homes to their nephews, sons of their brother Henry and an enslaved woman named Nancy, and supported the boys so that Archibald could go to Harvard Law School, and Francis to Princeton Theological Seminary. Sarah Grimké continued to fight for women’s rights and the fair treatment of African Americans for the rest of her life. She was the vice president of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association in 1868. A few years later, she led a group of women in Hyde Park, Boston to vote in the local election even though it was against the law. At age 79, she was still walking the streets, passing out copies of John Stuart Mill’s book Subjection of Women. She died in December 1873 at the age of 81.
November 26, 1827 – Ellen Gould White born, co-founder of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and author. She claimed she had over 2,000 visions and dreams from God, which she verbally described in meetings, and published for public consumption; noted for her Conflict of the Ages series of books on conflict between Christ and Satan, and Biblical history.
November 26, 1832 – Mary Edwards Walker born, American physician and surgeon, Medal of Honor recipient, women’s rights activist, and early advocate for rational dress. She volunteered during the Civil War, becoming the first woman surgeon to be paid by the U.S. Army, but as a civilian. In April 1864, Walker was captured and arrested as a spy by the Confederates when she crossed enemy lines to treat wounded civilians and soldiers. She was working with a Confederate doctor performing an amputation at the time of her capture. Sent to the notorious Castle Thunder Prison for political prisoners and spies, Walker, the ardent adherent to rational dress, refused to wear the dresses and skirts provided as “more becoming of her sex.” She continued to wear her work clothes, which were made over from a man’s shirt and trousers (Walker often replied to criticism, “I don’t wear men’s clothes, I wear my own clothes.”) She was released in a prisoner exchange for a Confederate doctor in August, 1864. After the war, Walker was awarded a disability pension for partial muscular atrophy suffered while she was imprisoned by the enemy, and Generals William Tecumseh Sherman and George Henry Thomas recommended her for the Medal of Honor, which originally was not strictly a military honor. On November 11, 1865, President Andrew Johnson signed the bill awarding her the medal, the only woman ever to receive the Medal of Honor, and one of only eight civilians. It was stricken from the rolls in 1917, and she was ordered to surrender it, but she wore it until her death in 1919. After a prolonged campaign by her admirers, in 1977 President Jimmy Carter restored Dr. Walker’s medal posthumously.
November 26, 1858 – Katharine Drexel born, American heiress, religious sister, philanthropist, and educator; the second American to be canonized a saint and the first one born as an American citizen. She was appalled by what she read in Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1881 book A Century of Dishonor, which chronicles the injustice of the treatment of Native Americans by the U.S. government. Traveling in the Western states in 1884, she saw the plight and destitution of the Native Americans. Upon their father’s death in 1885, she and her two sisters each inherited $14 million. In January 1887, the sisters were received in a private audience by Pope Leo XIII at the Vatican. They asked him for missionaries to staff some Indian missions that they had been financing. To their surprise, the Pope suggested that Katharine become a missionary herself. In 1891, she founded a religious congregation, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament. After winning approval of her new Order’s Rule, and three and a half years of training, she and her first band of nuns opened a boarding school, St. Catherine's Indian School, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In all, Drexel established 145 missions, 50 schools for African Americans, and 12 schools for Native Americans.
N ovember 26, 1862 – Harriet Beecher Stowe is introduced to President Abraham Lincoln, who says, “So this is the little lady who made the big war.”
Harriet Beecher Stowe meets Abraham Lincoln — by Bruno Lucchesi, in Hartford CT
November 26, 1900 – Anna Maurizio born, Swiss biologist, known for her study of bees, lasting over thirty years, at the Department of Bees at the Liebfeld Federal Dairy Industry and Bacteriological Institute, which included developing new methods for determining the amount of pollen in honey.
November 26, 1903 – Alice Herz-Sommer born in the Kingdom of Bohemia, Jewish pianist, music teacher, and supercentenarian who survived Theresienstadt concentration camp. She lived for 40 years in Israel, before emigrating to London in 1986, where she resided until her death at the age of 110. She was the second longest-living Holocaust survivor after Yisrael Kristal, who lived to be 113.
November 26, 1907 – Ruth Patrick born, American botanist and limnologist (studies inland water systems) specializing in diatoms and freshwater ecology. The belief that biodiversity is the chief indicator of water health is now known as the Patrick Principle. Her studies in the 1930s would help galvanize the environmental movement, but when she applied for a job in 1934 at the Academy of Natural Sciences (ANS), she was told she would not be paid, and warned not to wear lipstick to work. It took about seven years for her to finally be given a salary, but she went on to form and chair the Department of Limnology at the ANS in 1947. She invented the diatometer, which takes more accurate samples for study of diversity in water ecology, and also developed other methods of measuring the health of freshwater ecosystems. Her pioneering work led to the 1972 Clean Water Act, the chief U.S. law focused on reducing and preventing water pollution. In 1973, she became the first woman chair of the ANS board of trustees. In 1976, she was made a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1996, she was awarded the National Medal of Science. Ruth Patrick continued to work well into her 90s, and lived to the age of 106.
November 26, 1915 – Inge King born, to a Jewish family in Germany; she fled to Britain in 1939, studied at the Glasgow School of Art; emigrated to Australia in 1951, where she was at the forefront of modern non-figurative sculpture; best known for Forward Surge
‘Forward Surge’ (1972) — by Inge King
November 26, 1936 – Margaret Boden born, English computer scientist and psychologist, noted for research in cognitive science, which includes artificial intelligence and psychology.
November 26, 1936 – Tina Turner born, American singer-actress; after her husband Ike Turner became addicted to cocaine and was increasingly abusive, she filed for divorce, and shouldered the debts for canceled concerts and an IRS lien while rebuilding her career, this time as a solo artist. She was one of the first African-Americans to have a video aired on MTV. In 1984, her album, Private Dancer, sold over 10 million copies, and she won four Grammy Awards in 1985. She contributed vocals to the USA for Africa benefit song, “We Are the World.” Turner was a Kennedy Center Honors recipient in 2005, and was honored with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018. She renounced her American citizenship, and became a Swiss citizen in 2013. She was diagnosed with cancer in 2016, and had a kidney transplant in 2017.
November 26, 1942 – Olivia Cole born, American television actress; best known as the first African American woman to win an Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Television Movie, for her performance as Matilda in Roots. She was also nominated for a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries for playing Maggie in the 1979 miniseries Backstairs at the White House.
November 26, 1942 – Đ ặ ng Thùy Trâm born, battlefield surgeon for North Vietnam during the Vietnam War, and posthumous author. She was killed in disputed circumstances by U.S. forces in 1970, but her wartime diaries had been kept, against orders, by American soldiers, who searched for her family for years. The soldiers finally found her mother, and gave her the diaries. When Nh ậ t ký Đ ặ ng Thùy Trâm (Đ ặ ng Thùy Trâm's Diary: Last Night I Dreamed Of Peace
November 26, 1943 – Marilynne Robinson born in Idaho, and earned her Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Washington in Seattle; American author and essayist; winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Gilead, Housekeeping Home, and her many collections of essays, including The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought and The Givenness of Things: Essays .
November 26, 1944 – Joyce Quin born, Baroness Quin, Member of the European Parliament for Tyne and Wear (1979-1984); British Labour Party MP for Gateshead East (1987-1997); Minister of State for Europe (1998-1999); author of a 2010 book on the British Constitution.
November 26, 1948 – Elizabeth Blackburn born in Tasmania, Australian-American molecular biologist, President of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies; discoverer of the enzyme telomerase, which replenishes telomeres, the protectors for the ends of chromosomes from DNA damage or fusion; she shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Jack Szostak and Carol W. Greider “for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase.”
November 26, 1952 – Elsa Salazar Cade born, Mexican-American science teacher and entomologist; selected by the National Science Teachers Association as one of the top ten science teachers in 1995; she and her husband William Cade have studied the Texas field cricket, Gryllus texensis,
November 26, 1953 – Desiré Wilson born, South African racecar driver; one of only six women to compete in Formula One racing; she became the only woman to win a Formula One race, the 1980 British Aurora F1 Championship at the Brands Hatch racing circuit, in West Kingsdown, Kent, England.
November 26, 1954 – Roz Chast born, American cartoonist; The New Yorker has run over 800 of her cartoons, and they have also appeared in Scientific American and the Harvard Business Review.
November 26, 1955 – Gisela Stuart born in Bavaria; British Labour politician; Chair of Change Britain organization; Member of Parliament for Birmingham Edgbaston (1997-2017).
November 26, 1959 – Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs born, American poet, cultural studies scholar, and feminist theorist; a commissioner for the Washington State Arts Commission and a professor at Seattle University.
November 26, 1969 – Kara Walker born, African-American contemporary artist and filmmaker.
Kara Walker — section of her silhouette mural ‘Slavery’
November 26, 1971 – Vicki Pettersson born, Urban Fantasy novelist; known for her Signs of the Zodiac series and Celestial Blues trilogy.
November 26, 2009 – Canadian reporter Amanda Linhout , along with Australian photographer Nigel Brennan, who had both been kidnapped in Somalia by Islamic insurgents, were released after 15 months in captivity, where they were beaten and tortured, and Linhout was raped repeatedly. Their families paid a ransom of almost £600,000 ($1 million). Linhout became an activist for human rights and women’s rights, and published A House in the Sky: A Memoir in 2013, which recounts her early life, travels, and the hostage ordeal.
Amanda Linhout and Nigel Brennan
November 26, 2019 – Willie Murphy , an 82-year-old woman in Rochester, NY, beat up a burglar who broke into her home. Murphy is a body builder works out almost every day at her local Y. “I’m alone and I’m old, but guess what – I’m tough,” she said “He picked the wrong house to break into.” She hit him with a table repeatedly, then blinded him with baby shampoo. When the police arrived, burglar was sent under arrest to the hospital in an ambulance.
November 26, 2020 – Brazilian volleyball star Carol Solberg got some backlash after shouting “Fora, Bolsonaro!” (Bolsonaro out!) in a post-match interview, but got an even bigger surge of support. Solberg has become a powerful symbol of opposition to Brazil’s far-right leader and an unexpected champion of free speech . Her image and her opposition to Bolsonaro were splashed across newspaper and magazine front pages, with one weekly proclaiming her Brazil’s “Active Voice.” Jair Bolsonaro, President of Brazil, has been criticized for stripping Brazil’s indigenous affairs agency of responsibility for identifying and demarcation of indigenous lands, which opened the way for increasing deforestation in the Brazilian Rainforest, for his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic (Brazil has reported the loss of over 611,000 people to Covid, but he and his administration have consistently downplayed the severity of the disease), as well as a deepening economic crisis. “I wanted to use my voice for a cause I consider urgent,” Solberg said of her decision to speak out during a post-match interview after she had won a bronze medal at a beach volleyball tournament in Rio.
Brazilian volleyball star Carol Solberg — photo by Sam Wasson
November 26, 2021 – Maryam Nuri Mohamed Amin , a 24-year-old Kurdish woman, was messaging her fiancé, who lives in the UK, when the dinghy she was in with other refugees starting deflating in the English Channel. She is the first victim of the mass drowning to be named. All but two of the passengers died off the northern coast of France. Seventeen men, six other women (one was pregnant), and three children all lost their lives in the biggest loss of life by drowning in the Channel in years. Amin’s fiancé was following her position using GPS tracking as they were exchanging messages on Snapchat when the boat began losing air, and the passengers tried to bail out the incoming water. An emergency search was triggered just after 2 pm on November 24 when a fishing boat spotted several people in the sea off the coast of France. A joint search-and-rescue operation by British and French authorities was launched, but was called off late on the 24th. Police said they believe the boat set out from the Dunkirk area east of Calais. The French authorities arrested five suspected human traffickers in connection with the incident. More than three times the number of people have crossed the Channel in 2021 than in 2020. The issue has caused tension both in the UK government, and between the UK and France.
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November 27, 1809 – Fanny Kemble born, notable British actress and author. On an American tour, she met and was courted by Pierce M. Butler, whom she married in 1832. Butler inherited three of his family’s plantations on Butler Island in Georgia, which he did not take his wife and children to see until the winter of 1838-1839; she wrote her horrified impressions in her journal, but Butler forbid her to publish it, threatening to deny her access to her daughters. He grew increasingly abusive. When she finally left him, he filed for divorce, assuming sole custody of their daughters, which American law at the time automatically gave to men in divorces. Kemble resumed touring to earn her living, and in 1863, she published her anti-slavery Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839, after excerpts had been privately circulating among abolitionists for years. It was widely read in England, and contributed to the British public’s desire that their country should remain neutral during the U.S. Civil War, in spite of Britain’s economic ties to the Southern States and their cotton plantations. In 1877, Kemble returned to England, where she became friends with American writer Henry James, and published Notes on Some of Shakespeare's Plays (1882).
November 27, 1863 – Olga Yulianivna Kobylyanska born, Ukrainian modernist novelist, short story writer, and founding member of women’s movement organizations in what was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Tsarivna (Princess), Zemlya (Land), and her short stories Pictures from the life of Bukovyna, and Valse melancolique.
November 27, 1875 – Elsie Clews Parsons born, American ethnologist, anthropologist, folklorist, and feminist social critic. She was an expert on customs of the Indian tribes of the southwestern U.S., especially the Hopi and Pueblo. Parsons was born into a socially prominent family, but asserted her independence, becoming a feminist with radical ideas far ahead of her time. Her book, The Family, was excoriated when it was published in 1906, because she proposed trial marriages, divorce by mutual consent, and access to reliable contraception, and wrote about the stifling effects on both men and women of society’s gender role expectations. Fear and Conventionality, published in 1914, was a devastating critique of the middle-class American family, arguing that fear of strangers led to reluctance to travel, and the elaborate etiquette surrounding social instructions, making new acquaintances, and entertaining served to protect and “disinfect” the home against “contamination” by outsiders. Strict separation by age and gender also kept family members from breaking out of their established roles. Influenced by meeting anthropologist Franz Boas during a 1915 visit to the American southwest, she became interested in working among Native Americans of that region, the beginning of 25 years of diligent study. In 1939, she published Pueblo Indian Religion in two volumes. Boas complimented this massive collection as "a summary of practically all we know about Pueblo religion and an indispensable source book for every student of Indian life." In 1940, she was elected as the first woman president of the American Anthropological Association. Her Journal of a Feminist was published after she died in 1941, and then was re-published in 1994 by Thoemmes Press as part of their Subversive Women series.
November 27, 1877 – Katharine Anthony born, American author of histories and biographies, including: Feminism in Germany and Scandinavia, Margaret Fuller: A Psychological Biography, Catherine the Great, Louisa May Alcott, First Lady of the Revolution: The Life of Mercy Otis Warren, The Lambs, Susan B. Anthony: Her Personal History and Her Era.
November 27, 1894 – Katherine Milhous born, American painter, illustrator, and author; noted for her graphic designs for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the depression; won the 1951 Caldecott Medal for picture book illustration for The Egg Tree.
November 27, 1900 – Jovette Bernier born, Canadian journalist, novelist, poet, and scriptwriter/radio show host in the 1930s for Bonjour madame and Quelles nouvelles.
November 27, 1911 – Fé del Mundo born, Filipina pediatrician; the first woman admitted to Harvard Medical School (1936-1938, then returned for a 2-year research fellowship, 1939-1940, after her residency) because the admissions office assumed she was a man, but she was allowed to stay because her strong record earned the approval of the head of pediatrics. Harvard Medical School did not officially accept women students until 1945. She was also the founder of the first pediatric hospital in the Philippines. During WWII, she joined the International Red Cross, and set up a makeshift hospice within an internment camp until 1943, when the Japanese shut it down. She then started a children’s hospital in Manila, which was converted temporarily to a medical center to cope with casualties during the Battle of Manila. Her medical career spanned almost 8 decades; honored with the 1977 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service, and conferred with the rank of National Scientist of the Philippines in 1980. She died at age 99.
November 27, 1917 – In response to public outcry over the brutal treatment of the suffragists, and their jailers’ inability to stop the National Woman’s Party picketers’ hunger strikes , the U.S. government begins unconditionally releasing the women protesters, who had been arrested for misdemeanors, but were put in among women convicted of felonies, and abused by the jailers, including the beating and shackling of leader Lucy Burns, arms above her head, to her cell’s bars overnight.
Lucy Burns — and National Woman’s Party picketers in front of the White House
November 27, 1921 – Dr. Dora Dougherty Strother born, American pilot with WWII Woman Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) and a B-29 Superfortress demonstration pilot; she earned a PhD in Aviation Education from NYU in 1955; was a member of the Ninety-Nines; and President of the Whirly-Girls (1979-1981). As a human factors engineer with Bell Helicopter Company from 1958, she conducted research on pilot performance and cockpit design to determine ways in which cockpits and instruments could be better adapted to the pilots' needs. She also designed flight simulators. She received the Amelia Earhart Award for academic achievement, and was inducted into the Military Aviation Hall of Fame. She died at age 91 in 2013, just eight days before her birthday.
November 27, 1937 – Opening night of the ILGWU-produced play Pins and Needles (International Ladies Garment Workers Union) were the performers, and it was written by Harold Rome. The play ran from 1937 to 1940, and was revived in 1978.
November 27, 1937 – Gail Sheehy born, American author and journalist; she covered Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign and Woodstock for New York Passages
November 27, 1937 – Marilyn Hacker born, American poet, translator, and critic; her poetry collection Presentation Piece (1974) won the National Book Award, and has won three PEN Awards for Poetry in Translation.
November 27, 1943 – Nicole Brossard born, a leading French-Canadian poet and novelist; Mécanique jongleuse (Day-Dream Mechanics) and Double Impression each won the Governor General's Award for Poetry.
November 27, 1950 – Olive Shisana born, South African physician; CEO of the research firm, Evidence Based Solutions; expert in the epidemiology and risk factors associated with HIV, and a pioneer in management and policy development; appointed as the first Director General of the Department of Health in the Mandela Administration; served as the first woman CEO of the Human Sciences Research Council for 10 years.
November 27, 1951 – Kathryn Bigelow born, American director, producer, and screenwriter; first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director, in 2009, for The Hurt Locker, which also won the Oscar for Best Picture.
November 27, 1952 – Sheila Copps born, Canadian Liberal Party politician; Minister of Canadian Heritage (1984-2004) and the first woman Deputy Prime Minister of Canada (1993-1997); advocate for the legal rights of women and minorities, and protection of the environment.
November 27, 1957 – Caroline Kennedy born, American attorney, author, and diplomat; U.S. Ambassador to Japan (2013-2017).
Ambassador Carolyn Kennedy in Japan
November 27, 1957 – Callie Khouri born, American film and television screenwriter, producer, and director; won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Thelma & Louise; Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood; Nashville.
November 27, 1960 – Yulia Tymoshenko born, Ukranian politician; Prime Minister of Ukraine (2007-2010); Vice Prime Minister with responsibility for the fuel and energy complex (1999-2001).
November 27, 1968 – Penny Ann Early became the first woman to play major professional basketball, for the Kentucky Colonels in an American Basketball Association game against the Los Angeles Stars.
November 27, 1969 – Ruth George born, British Labour politician; Member of Parliament for High Peak since 2017; the first woman MP to be elected from High Peak.
November 27, 1979 – Hilary Hahn born, Grammy-winning American violinist who has performed as a soloist with leading orchestras all over the world, and as a recitalist. She is a champion of contemporary music, and several composers have written works for her, including Soviet-born composer and pianist Lera Auerbach. After visiting a third grade class in upstate New York which had started asking everyone they knew who traveled to send them postcards from the cities they visited as geography project, she started posting “Postcards from the Road” on her website, which she has since expanded into a travel journal.
November 27, 1984 – Leslie Dewan born; American nuclear engineer; co-founder and CEO of Transatomic Power (2011-2018).
November 27, 1999 – Helen Clark , leader of New Zealand’s centre-left Labour Party, becomes the first elected woman Prime Minister of New Zealand.
November 27, 2015 – An armed anti-abortion extremist invaded the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs , CO, with a semi-automatic rifle, fatally shooting three people, and wounding nine others. One of the dead was a police officer responding to the attack, while the other two victims were accompanying friends. All the victims left behind families with young children. After five hours, SWAT teams crashed vehicles into the lobby and the shooter surrendered. The shooter, who had been living in North Carolina, was held without bond. Authorities in North and South Carolina had previously investigated him numerous times. State psychiatrists in Colorado later determined that he was mentally incompetent to stand trial, and he was confined in a state mental hospital.
November 27, 2019 – Keith Schembri, the Maltese prime minister’s chief of staff, who had resigned earlier, was arrested and questioned about allegations that he was a co-conspirator in the murder of investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia . The allegations came from Yorgen Fenech, under arrest for his alleged involvement in the murder, who was stopped by police trying to leave Malta on his yacht. Daphne Caruana Galizia was Malta’s foremost investigative journalist when she was killed in October 2017 by a bomb fixed to her car, which detonated near her home in the village of Bidnija. She exposed corruption at the highest levels in government and business circles. The killing of a prominent journalist within a European member state drew international attention and raised concerns about the rule of law in Malta. Schembri was later released. In August, 2021, Malta’s attorney general laid formal charges against businessman Yorgen Fenech, and called for a life sentence for allegedly masterminding the murder of the journalist.
November 27, 2020 – In the UK, toward the end of 2019, Dr. June Rainedirector of a sector called the Vigilance and Risk Management of Medicines, part of the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), was looking forward to retiring in 2020 from an exemplary 35-year career in public health. Then COVID-19 hit, and instead, she stepped up to the helm of MHRA, the UK’s chief medical regulator, taking on what is likely the most vital task in the agency’s history: assessing the vaccines that are supposed to end the coronavirus crisis, and ensuring that the rush to get them into action does not come at the cost of patient safety. MHRA approved the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, paving the way for immunisation for those most at risk to begin in the first week of December – and making the UK the first western country to issue a license. “Normally the process of making a vaccine and putting it through clinical trials is five or 10 years,” said Sir Gordon Duff, a former chair of the MHRA. “With coronavirus, that has had to be done without compromising safety or standards in less than a year. It is the MHRA that will tell us if a vaccine is safe. And ultimately the buck stops with her.”
November 27, 2021 – Dying to Divorce , a documentary by British director Chloe FairweatherDying to Divorce exposes the violent misogyny and dangerous politics behind an epidemic of femicide in Turkey, a country where an astonishing one in three women is subjected to some form of domestic violence. Fairweather was in Turkey filming another project when she met Arzu, who was married off by her father at age 14 to a farmer 10 years her senior. She had children before tensions in the led to her asking for a divorce. Enraged, her husband fired seven shotgun shells at close range into her arms and legs. In the film, speaking from a prison telephone as he awaits trial, her husband explains he sees his actions as the inevitable consequence of his wife’s behaviour. had been working for Bloomberg News in London as a television presenter when she met her husband Neptun, who was then working as a producer. At first, her relatives in Turkey, where they returned to live, celebrated the match. Then, two days after the birth of her daughter, her husband viciously hit the back of her head four times during an argument. She suffered a serious hemorrhage which initially left her unable to speak or walk. Her husband claimed her debilitating brain damage was the result of the Caesarian section operation his wife had recently undergone, and nothing to do with the evident trauma to her skull. Deprived permanently of controlled movement and, perhaps most cruelly, of the easy articulacy that had marked her out in her career, it has taken years for Kubra to win the right to see her own daughter again and longer still to get a semblance of justice in the courts. Even now, although her husband has been convicted of the attack, he has not served time in prison. “The unfairness, and the contrast, between the way Kubra’s life was before, and how she is now, and what she has to do to be able to testify in person in court is extraordinary,” said Bozkurt, who campaigns against the legal changes introduced by Recep Erdoğan, Turkey’s authoritarian president. Erdoğan has publicly declared that women and men could not be treated equally “because it goes against the laws of nature,” and that the only job women should have is motherhood. Dying for Divorce had already been praised at several European film festivals, but it was declared by organizers to be too provocative to screen at the annual international film festival staged in Istanbul every year.
November 27, 2021 – Exiled Afghan Member of Parliament Nazifa Yousufi Bek tells a room packed with her peers in Athens, “Our people have nothing. Mothers are selling their children. We must raise our voices, we must put a stop to this.” Yousufi Bek, from the northern Takhar province, fled with her husband and three children after the Taliban swept back into power. She is one of 28 female MPs who have found refuge in Greece. These women made up over 40% of Afghanistan’s female MPs. During meetings with Greece’s prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, and president, Katerina Sakellaropoulou, the MPs have pushed the country’s authorities to advocate for Afghan women with other EU member states. They have also petitioned several ambassadors, including the US envoy, to pressure their governments to consider human rights when working with the Taliban. Shagufa Noorzai , who was a teacher before she became the youngest member of parliament at age 24, came up with the idea of an Afghan Women’s Parliament in Exile , as a way to keep attention on the women’s rights crisis under Taliban rule, to press for aid to reache the millions of starving Afghans facing a cruel winter, and to keep pressure on western nations to provide safe passage for Afghan women who worked as judges, prosecutors, activists , and the nine women MPs who are still in Afghanistan, as well as the women who served in the security forces .
Nazifa Yousufi Bek — Afghan Womens Parliament in Exile — Shagufa Noorzai
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November 28, 1489 – Margaret Tudor born, sister of King Henry VIII of England, Queen Consort of Scotland (1503-1513) by her marriage to James IV of Scotland. After the king’s death in 1513 at the disastrous Battle of Flodden against the English, their infant son was crowned James V of Scotland, and she became regent (1513-1515). Before long a pro-French party among the Scottish nobility was urging that she should be replaced by John Stewart, 2nd Duke of Albany, the closest male relative to the infant prince, and now third in line to the throne. Albany, born and raised in France, was seen as a living representative of the Auld Alliance, in contrast with the pro-English Margaret. She is considered to have acted calmly and with some degree of political skill. By July 1514, she had managed to reconcile the contending parties, and Scotland – along with France – concluded peace with England that same month. But in her search for political allies amongst the fractious Scottish nobility she took a fatal step – she allied herself with Archibald Douglas, 6th Earl of Angus, and then made matters worse by marrying him secretly in 1514. By the terms of the late king's will, she had sacrificed her position as Regent of Scotland, and before the month was out she was obliged to consent to the appointment of Albany. He arrived in Scotland in 1515, and was installed as regent in July. With the princes in the hands of their uncle, Margaret, now expecting a child by Angus, retired to Edinburgh. She reluctantly determined to flee the country, but as Dowager Queen, she was forced to beg permission from the Privy Council even to travel. She obtained permission to go to Linlithgow Palace for her lying-in. From there, she escaped and managed to cross the border to England, and made her way to her brother’s court. Her marriage to Angus foundered – he left her in England, returned to Scotland to protect his property rights, and had an affair which he did little to hide. She took the radical step of getting a divorce, but then married Henry Stewart, 1st Lord Methven, who proved an even worse husband than Angus. Margaret died at Methven Castle in 1541 at age 51, after what was probably a stroke.
November 28, 1774 – Princess Maria Antonia of Parma born, a talented painter; due to the occupation of Parma by the French, she never married, and became an Ursuline nun in 1803.
November 28, 1853 – Helen Magill White born, American academic; first woman to earn a PhD in the U.S, in Greek; director of Howard Collegiate Institute (1883-1887); and taught at Evelyn College for Women, the women’s annex to Princeton University.
November 28, 1861 – Adina De Zavala born, American historian, teacher, author, Texas history preservationist; History and Legends of the Alamo and Other Missions In and Around San Antonio ( 1917) highlighted the role of women and minorities in the history of both the Alamo and Texas.
November 28, 1875 – Joanna Margaret Cruickshank born, British military nurse and nursing administrator. She founded Princess Mary's Royal Air Force Nursing Service in November 1918 and served as its first Matron-in-Chief from 1921 until her retirement in November 1930. She was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1931. In 1940, Cruickshank was named Commandant of the Rushen Women's and Married Internees Camp on the Isle of Man; she was later succeeded by Detective Inspector Cuthbert of New Scotland Yard. She died at age 82 in 1958.
November 28, 1881 – Organizational meeting held to form Association of Collegiate Alumnae, predecessor of American Association of University Women (AAUW).
November 28, 1891 – Mabel Alvarez born in Hawaii to a Spanish family (her father was a doctor involved in leprosy research), American painter; noted for her contributions to Southern California Modernism and California Impressionism; she painted a mural for the 1915-1916 Panama-California Exposition, which won a Gold Medal; one of the original members of the ‘Group of Eight’ formed as part of California’s progressive art movement.
‘Silent Places’ — painting by Mabel Alvarez
November 28, 1893 – New Zealand women vote for the first time in a general election. The Electoral Bill granting women the franchise had been given Royal Assent by Governor Lord Glasgow in September 1893. Also in 1893, suffrage supporter Elizabeth Yates won election as Mayor of Onehunga (1894) by 13 votes, not only the first woman to hold the office in New Zealand, but the first woman mayor anywhere in the British Empire. She was defeated in the next election, after a year of loud opposition and meetings disrupted by both the town council and town clerks.
Auckland ‘Lady’ Voters in line
November 28, 1896 – Dawn Powell born, American author; after her mother’s death when she was seven, she lived with a series of relatives until her father remarried; when her stepmother destroyed her notebooks and diaries, she ran away to live with an aunt who encouraged her writing. Powell later wrote the semiautobiographical novel, My Home is Far Away. She Walks in Beauty, Dance Night Walking Down Broadway, Hello, Sister!, A Time to Be Born,
November 28, 1900 – Mary Bothwell born, Canadian classical vocalist and painter; during her tenure as president of the Canadian Women’s Club of New York City (1958-1959) she encouraged the careers of young Canadian performers. She was also known for her paintings of flowers – 36 of her botanical studies were exhibited at the Horticultural Society of New York in 1971. She died at age 84 in 1985.
November 28, 1903 – Alice Cook born, social worker and labor activist who became a professor of labor history and a university ombudsman; she increased union representation of textile workers, taught at Cornell University (1952-1972), and established Cornell’s Department of Women’s Studies.
November 28, 1904 – Nancy Mitford born, English satiric novelist, essayist, and social commentator ; eldest of the Mitford sisters; noted for her novels, The Pursuit of Love, and Love in a Cold Climate.
November 28, 1907 – Rose Brampton born, American opera singer whose career was at its height in the 1930s and 1940s. She sang at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, for eighteen consecutive seasons between 1932 and 1950, and toured in Europe, South America, and South Africa. She left the Met when Rudolf Bing became the company’s general manager in 1950, and retired from the stage in 1963. She became a voice teacher, and taught at the Manhattan School of Music and then the Juilliard School (1974-1991). She died in 2007.
November 28, 1910 – Elsie Quarterman born, American botanist and plant ecologist, noted for her work on the ecology of Tennessee cedar glades, a rare habitat dominated by herbs on shallow soils and limestone outcrops, containing many unique plant species; in 1969 she rediscovered the native Tennessee coneflower, Echinacea tennesseensis,
November 28, 1919 – Lady Nancy Astor elected as the first woman to sit in the British House of Commons (Countess Markievicz was elected earlier, but as a member of the Irish Sinn Féin , did not take her seat).
November 28, 1924 – Johanna Döbereiner born a German-Czech, became a Brazilian citizen in 1956; agronomist and microbiologist who studied how Azospirillum and other bacteria could improve the soil, which played an important role in Brazil’s soybean production because the bacteria reduced the need for fertilizer; honored with the 1989 UNESCO Science Prize and the Brazilian Order of Scientific Merit in 1992.
November 28, 1936 – Carol Gilligan born, American psychologist; in 1977, she became Harvard’s first professor of Gender Studies. Her research questions that most traditional theories of human psychological development studied boys and men. She developed a theory based on the experiences of girls and women. In psychological tests of moral judgment, for example, girls were often graded as deficient. But Gilligan demonstrated in her landmark 1982 book, In a Different Voice, was that girls place more emphasis on feelings and relationships than on objective standards of justice, and boys tend to do the opposite. Before she published her studies, researchers sometimes dropped women from their samples because the women's different responses complicated the research.
November 28, 1944 – Rita Mae Brown born, American novelist, screenwriter, feminist, and LGBT rights activist; known for her first novel Rubyfruit Jungle, and the Mrs. Murphy mystery series, “co-authored” with her cat, Sneaky Pie Brown.
November 28, 1947 – Maria Farantouri born, Greek singer, activist, and politician; recorded protest songs during the Greek military junta (1967-1974); elected to the Greek Parliament representing the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK – 1989-1993).
November 28, 1947 – Gladys Kokorwe born, Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) politician and stateswoman; Speaker of the National Assembly of Botswana since 2014; elected to the National Assembly in 1994, also serving in various ministries in the government between 1999 and 2009, and as Deputy Speaker (2004-2008). Notably she was the author and sponsor of the Domestic Violence Act, which became law in 2008. She left the assembly to become Botswana’s ambassador to Zimbabwe (2009-2014), then was returned to the assembly as its speaker in the 2014 elections.
November 28, 1948 – Agnieszka Holland born, Polish film and television director, and screenwriter; best known for Europa Europa, In Darkness, Spoor,
November 28, 1951 – Barbara Morgan born, American schoolteacher and NASA Astronaut as part of the Teacher in Space program. She was a Mission Specialist on STS-118 in 2007.
November 28, 1953 – Helen De Michiel born, American filmmaker and multimedia director-producer; documentaries include Turn Here, Sweet Corn (1990), The Gender Chip Project (2006) and Lunch Love Community (2014).
November 28, 1956 – Fiona Armstrong born, Lady MacGregor and currently Lord Lieutenant of Dumfries, Scottish newspaper/television journalist and columnist; she has also made over 20 films on Scottish clan history.
November 28, 1964 – Sian Williams born, Welsh journalist and current affairs presenter for the BBC and News 5, on programs which include BBC Breakfast, Sunday Morning Live, 5 News, Save Money: Good Health.
November 28, 1967 – Stephanie Weir born, American comedian, actress, and writer; best known as a cast member of MADtv (2000-2006). She has written and produced for the sitcoms Raising Hope (2010-2014) and The Millers (2013-2015). She also had a YouTube channel called WeirDass (2014-2015).
November 28, 1984 – Naoko Yamada born, Japanese television and film director and animator. She is known for the anime films A Silent Voice and Liz and the Blue Bird.
November 28, 2017 – NBC fired longtime Today show host Matt Lauer after a colleague accused him of sexual misconduct in the workplace. Lauer’s former co-anchor, Savannah Guthrie, announced the news at the start of the show. “We are grappling with a dilemma that so many people have faced these last few weeks: How do you reconcile your love for someone with the revelation that they have behaved badly?” Guthrie said. In a memo to staff, NBC News chairman Andy Lack explained that “... we received a detailed complaint from a colleague about inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace by Matt Lauer.” Lack added that while “it is the first complaint about his behavior in the over 20 years he’s been at NBC News, we were also presented with reason to believe this may not have been an isolated incident.” Variety published allegations by three unnamed women who also accused him of sexual harassment just hours after NBC announced Lauer had been fired. His wife filed for divorce in 2018, which was finalized in 2019.
November 28, 2019 – In the UK, Jo Swinson , a leading Liberal Democrat, declared that Boris Johnson is “not fit” to be prime minister. “Boris Johnson only cares about Boris Johnson,” she said. “He will do whatever it takes, sacrifice whatever or whoever is needed to get what he wants. His life has been about becoming prime minister. Not out of some burning desire to make people’s lives better, but out of some sense of Etonian entitlement, because it’s what people like him get to do. Boris Johnson doesn’t care about you and your family. Just take the case of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe – a British mother wrongfully imprisoned, a small child devastated, separated from her mum. When he was talking about that case, his words would be used against Nazanin at her trial.” She added, “Whether it is the sexist, patronising crap of comparing elite women athletes to wet otters, or him bragging about patting his female boss on the bottom ... this man isn’t someone our sons can look up to, that our daughters can have faith in.”
November 28, 2020 – Almost a year later, an independent review sexual harassment and misconduct at Britain’s Royal Academy of Music , chaired by University of London professor Peter Kopelman, found “a widespread culture among conservatoire students of the fear of ‘speaking out’ that appears to stem from the belief that powerful individuals have the potential to adversely influence opportunities for those in the music profession.” The academy was rocked by allegations of impropriety and harassment in December, 2019, when more than a dozen students claimed teachers had asked them for sexual favours or made lewd comments to them. One student was reportedly told to “get used to the casting couch”, while another was advised to take a year out to “go and work in a brothel” if they wanted to get ahead in their classical music career. Complaints came from male and female students, many still teenagers. One alleged being told “a blow job would be a good start” if they wanted to please their tutor. The Academy did not comment on the allegations at that time. The complaints were first leaked to the classical music blog Slipped Disc following the suspension of the school’s head of opera, Gareth Hancock. Hancock also worked as an opera director and was fired by the Glyndebourne Opera Company in November, 2019, for sending inappropriate texts to a singer he was training. Hancock was replaced as head of opera by Brenda Hurley. Students alleged they had faced a “blank wall” in getting their complaints taken seriously. Following damaging press coverage, the academy announced it was launching an independent investigation into its safeguarding policies and procedures. The academy was criticised for underestimating its responsibilities to the wellbeing of its students, who pay up to £15,950 ($21,422 USD) per year in fees (£30,550/$41,031 USD per year for international students) to attend. Kopelman reported that “students and many staff reported they were uncertain of senior management’s stance on safeguarding. It was perceived by some as reactive as opposed to proactive; this risks an impression that a main driver, on occasions, may be reputational damage limitation rather than the wellbeing of those involved.” The review was scathing of “inconsistencies in the recruitment and appointment of staff” at the academy, which prides itself for a reputation of setting standards of international excellence in classical music training. “No one should be invited into a teaching relationship without proper background scrutiny and reference checks. Within the contract, the academy should set out its expectations on conduct, including reference to the formal code of conduct.” Following the review, the academy confirmed that no contracts will be subject to review or terminated as a result of the safeguarding exercise, but that it was committing to “review, simplify and strengthen some of our pastoral care offering.”
November 28, 2021 – Before starting his world title defense in Dubai, Magnus Carlsen, reigning World Chess Champion, was asked why there is not a single active woman’s player in the top 100 now that Hou Yifan of China, ranked 83rd, is now focusing on academia. For Carlsen, the subject was “way too complicated” to answer in a few sentences, but suggested a number of reasons, particularly cultural, were to blame. Some, though, still believe it is down to biology. As recently as 2015, Nigel Short, vice-president of the world chess federation Fide, claimed “ men are hardwired to be better chess players than women , adding: “You have to gracefully accept that.” That claim raises the eyebrows of the greatest female chess player, Judit Polgar , who was ranked as high as No 8 in the world and, amusingly, has a winning record against Short. “It is not down to biology,” she said in an interview with the Guardian. “It’s just as possible for a woman to become the best as any guy. But there are so many difficulties and social boundaries for women generally in society. That is what blocks it.” The English international master Jovanka Houska believes this smaller pool has knock-on effects in other areas, particularly when it comes to being the only one or two girls in a group. “We have situations where the girls don’t feel very comfortable playing, whilst the boys can hang around, make friends and play amongst themselves and get better that way,” she says. Is sexism also a factor? “It is, sadly,” says Houska. “It’s mainly because there are so few women playing. And it’s reinforced by national federations who don’t publicise your achievements to help you with funding. When I look at the situation across Europe, I see a lot of top women players fighting their federations for basic things.” Last year the women’s Fide master Alexandra Botez , who is also the most popular female chess streamer, spoke of her shocking experiences in the sport and warned: “In chess so much predatory behaviour has been normalised.” In Botez’s view, it is far too common for men to use their age and position to go on the “hunt” for women and girls. “It has been going on for so long and no one blinks an eye,” she said. “The extent to which people never say anything and find things OK is pretty spooky.”
Judit Polgár — Jovanka Houska — Alexandra Botez
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November 29, 1752 – The Public Universal Friend born as Jemima Wilkinson , to Quaker parents in Rhode Island. The Friend suffered a severe illness in October 1776, and reported having died and been reanimated as a genderless evangelist, shunning both birth name and gendered pronouns. Founded the Society of Universal Friends, which stressed free will, opposition to slavery, and sexual abstinence. The Society’s most committed members were unmarried women. In the 1790s, they acquired land in western New York, and formed the township of Jerusalem. The Friend preached for the last time at a member’s funeral in April 1819, and died on July 1, 1819. The remaining members gradually died out, and the Society was gone by the 1860s.
November 29, 1832 – Louisa May Alcott born, American author, abolitionist, and feminist; best known for her novel, Little Women, but she had previously written Hospital Sketches, a collection of her letters home while she was serving as a nurse at the Union Hospital for six weeks during the Civil War before she contracted typhoid. She had also published anonymously at least 33 gothic “thrillers” in popular magazines, and wrote fiery novels under the nom de plume ‘A. M. Barnard.’ After Little Women, she wrote Little Men and Jo’s Boys. In 1877, she was a co-founder with Dr. Harriet Clisby and others of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union in Boston. Her other novels included Eight Cousins; Rose in Bloom; and Under the Lilacs. She died of a stroke at age 55 in 1888, two days after her father’s death.
November 29, 1835 – Empress Dowager Cixi born; she was selected as a concubine for Xianfeng Emperor, and when her son became the Tongzhi Emperor in 1861, she became the Empress Dowager. Ruthless and ambitious, she ousted the regents appointed by Xianfeng, and assumed the regency with Empress Dowager Ci’an . Cixi consolidated her control over the dynasty when she installed her nephew as the Guangxu Emperor at the death of the Tongzhi Emperor in 1875, contrary to the traditional rules of succession of the Qing dynasty that had ruled China since 1644. She supervised the Tongzhi Restoration, a series of reforms that helped the regime survive until 1911. Although Cixi refused to adopt Western models of government, she supported technological and military reforms and the Self-Strengthening Movement as a means of limited Westernization to preserve her own power and the dynasty. In regard to the Hundred Days' Reforms of 1898, she feared that sudden implementation would disrupt Manchu rule, and that the Japanese and other foreign powers would take advantage of the ensuing weakness, so she engineered a putsch to take over as regent, and placed the Guangxu Emperor under virtual house arrest for supporting said reformers, and may have poisoned him. She publicly executed the main reformers, ending China's modernization and fueling the public disfavor that would end her dynasty's rule. When the Boxer Rebellion led to invasion by Allied armies, Cixi backed the Boxer groups and declared war on the invaders to preserve her own power and the dynasty. The ensuing defeat was a stunning humiliation. She changed her tactics, becoming friendly to foreigners, and publically instituting reforms aimed at turning China into a constitutional monarchy, while privately continuing corrupt practices like selling titles and embezzling funds originally earmarked for building a new imperial navy, then channeling the money into vanity projects such as the Marble Boat, an architectural folly that is ironically "moored" on Lake Kunming. The death of both Cixi and the Guangxu Emperor in November 1908 left the court in hands of Manchu conservatives, two year old Puyi on the throne, and a deeply divided country.
November 29, 1843 – Gertrude Jekyll born, British horticulturalist, designer described as a “premier influence in garden design,” artist, photographer, and author; created over 400 gardens in the UK, Europe and the U.S., and contributed over 1,000 articles to magazines like Country Life The Garden; Colour in the Flower Garden,
Hestercombe Gardens — designed by Gertrude Jekyll
November 29, 1873 – Suzan Rose Benedict born, first woman to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Michigan; career at Smith College: professor (1921-1942), also Dean of Students (1918-1928), Chair of the Mathematics department (1928-1934); American Mathematical Society member.
November 29, 1876 – Nellie Tayloe Ross born, first woman U.S. governor (Wyoming) taking over when her husband died (1924-1927); a prohibition and worker’s rights supporter. FDR appointed her director of the U.S. Mint (1933-1953).
November 29, 1902 – Essie Parrish born, Kashaya Pomo tribal spiritual and political leader, expert basketweaver; worked with Robert Oswalt to create a Kashaya Pomo dictionary, and taught the language to tribe’s children, advocate for cultural heritage education for Native American children.
November 29, 1904 – Margaret Barr born
Margaret Barr: scene from dance mime ‘Factory’ (1931)
November 29, 1908 – Afet İnan born, Turkish historian and sociologist; she got her teaching qualification in 1922, and was assigned as a teacher at Elmali Girls’ School. After graduating from Bursa Teachers College for Girls in 1925, she taught primary school in Izmir, where she met Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the first president of Turkey, a strong believer in women’s education and equality. İnan became one of his eight adopted daughters. He arranged for her to study French in Switzerland (1925-1927), and then at the French Lycée Notre Dame de Sion, Istanbul. She was appointed as a secondary school teacher for history. In 1935, İnan went to Switzerland again to the University of Geneva (1936-1938). In 1939, after graduating, she obtained a PhD in sociology. In 1950, she became a professor at the University of Ankara. She was a co-founder and leading member of the Turkish Historical Society. The “Afet İnan Historical Studies Award” is given biennially by the Turkish History Foundation.
November 29, 1910 – Elizabeth Choy born as Yong Su-Moi, Singaporean WWII hero who served in the Singapore Volunteer Corps, where she was nicknamed “Gunner Choy” and also volunteered as a Medical Auxiliary Service nurse; with her husband, she smuggled money, clothing, medicine, and messages to British POWs interned by the Japanese in Changi Prison; they were both arrested, imprisoned, and tortured.
November 29, 1912 – Viola Smith born as Viola Schmitz, American drummer as the “fastest girl drummer in the world Smith wrote an article that year for Down Beat magazine titled "Give Girl Musicians a Break!" in which she declared that woman musicians could play just as well as men. She argued, "In these times of national emergency, many of the star instrumentalists of the big name bands are being drafted. Instead of replacing them with what may be mediocre talent, why not let some of the great girl musicians of the country take their place?'' She played with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, and performed with Ella Fitzgerald and Chick Webb. She continued to play into the 1970s. Smith died at the age of 107 in 2020.
November 29, 1915 – born, Burmese dissident writer and journalist; noted for her outspoken anti-government views and radical left wing journalism besides her outstanding work on traditional Burmese arts, theatre, dance and music, and several works of translation from English, both fiction and non-fiction; her political activism began during the 1936 university student strike, in which she and her friend M.A. Ma Ohn were the most prominent women student leaders; she and Ludu U Hia, the editor of the university’s magazine, became close during the strike, and were married in 1939. When WWII broke out in Burma in1942, they joined the Resistance. Her husband was arrested briefly, but let go. During this time, she translated several books by Japanese author Hino Ashihei, and Czech author Wanda Wasilewska. In 1945, her husband launched a fortnightly newspaper called the Ludu Journal, Ludu Daily
November 29, 1918 – Madeleine L'Engle , American YA author and poet; best known for A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels; 2004 National Humanities Medal.
November 29, 1919 – Pearl Primus born, American choreographer and dancer; fused modern dance with African dance. Her debut in 1943 created public demand for African American women in dance; also increased interest in anthropology, which helped preserve African dance tradition.
November 29, 1924 – Jane Freilicher born, American representational painter, noted for urban and country scenes.
‘In Broad Daylight’ — by Jane Freilicher
November 29, 1926 – Michi Weglyn born, costume designer and author; wrote Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of American Concentration Camps,
November 29, 1935 – Diane Ladd born as Rose Diane Ladner; American actress, film producer, director, and screenwriter; noted for her film performances in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Wild at Heart, Rambling Rose, Chinatown, and Ghosts of Mississippi. She made her Broadway debut in 1968 in Carry Me Back to Morningside Heights. She wrote, directed, and played the title role in the 1995 film Mrs. Munck. She has co-starred in the TV series Chesapeake Shores since 2016.
November 29, 1940 – Dame Janet H. Smith born, English judge, called to the Bar in 1972, practicing law before being appointed Queen’s Counsel in 1986; appointed in 1991 by Lancashire County Council to hold a public inquiry into reported abuse of autistic children at Scotforth House. In 1992, she was appointed as a High Court judge and Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Probably best known as chair of the Shipman Inquiry, a year-long investigation into British serial killer Dr. Harold Shipman, which concluded that he had murdered at least 215 patients, and possibly as many as 260 people. In 2002, she was the 4th woman promoted to the Court of Appeal (2002-2011). In 2011, she became the independent assessor for miscarriages of justice compensation for England and Wales. In 2012, she became Treasurer of Lincoln’s Court Inn, and was also asked by the BBC to lead an inquiry into sexual abuse charges against radio and television personality Jimmy Savile. Her review concluded that he had sexually abused 72 people and raped 8 people, including an 8-year-old, and that BBC staff members who were aware of complaints about his behavior did not pass them on to senior management due to an atmosphere of fear, and a culture of not complaining. She also provided a number of recommendations for reform of the BBC’s internal processes.
November 29, 1942 – Ann Dunham born, American anthropologist who studied the economic and rural development of Indonesia; as a consultant for the U.S. Agency for International Development, she created microcredit programs to address the poverty in rural villages; mother of Barack Obama.
November 29, 1942 – Maggie Thompson born, librarian, and editor of the Comic Buyers Guide, Fantasy Empire Movie Collector’s World
November 29, 1943 – Janet Holmes à Court born, Australian businesswoman and philanthropist; a supporter of medical research and the arts.
November 29, 1943 – Sue Miller born, American author of best-selling novels and short stories. Noted for her novels The Good Mother, While I Was Gone, The Arsonist.
November 29, 1947 – Petra Kelly born, German activist, one of the founders of Die Grünen , the German Green Party; campaigned against nuclear weapons, and for peace, protecting the environment and women’s rights; elected to the Bundestag representing Bavaria (1983-1991); murdered in 1992 by her partner, who then killed himself.
November 29, 1953 – Jackie French born, prolific Australian author of fiction and nonfiction books, primarily for young readers, including her eight-book nonfiction series Fair Dinkum,
November 29, 1956 – Yvonne Fovargue born, British Labour politician, Member of Parliament for Makerfield since 2010. She served as Opposition Whip in 2011.
November 29, 1956 – Katrin Saks born, Estonian politician; currently vice-chair of the Social Democratic Party; Member of the European Parliament (2006-2009 and 2014); Minister of Population and Ethnic Affairs (1999-2002); Member of the Estonian Parliament (2003-2006); Open Estonia Fund project manager (1998-2000).
November 29, 1957 – Janet Napolitano born, American lawyer, Democratic politician, and university administrator; President of the University of California since 2013; U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security (2009-2013); Chair of the National Governors Association (2006-2007); Governor of Arizona (2003-2009); Attorney General of Arizona (1999-2003); U.S Attorney for the District of Arizona (1993-1997).
November 29, 1965 – Lauren Child born, English awarding-winning children’s author and artist; in 2000, she won the Kate Greenaway medal for I Will Not Ever Never Eat a Tomato, Charlie and Lola
November 29, 1973 – Sarah Jones born, African American playwright, poet, and actress; noted for her one-woman theatre shows, including Bridge & Tunnel, She has a multicultural heritage which includes African-American and Caribbean ancestry, and The New Yorker said of her solo shows that she "lays our mongrel nation before us with gorgeous, pitch-perfect impersonations of the rarely heard or dramatized." In 2001, she went to court to fight the ban when her song “Your Revolution” was declared “indecent” by the FCC and the radio station that played it was fined. After a two-year wait, joined by the ACLU, she won her case, and the FCC rescinded their initial notice, making the song available for air play.
November 29, 1982 – Ashley Force born, American drag racer, selected in 2007 as NHRA POWERade Drag Racing Series Rookie of the Year, after she won her first NHRA Professional-category win. She retired from active competition after the birth of her first child.
November 29, 2015 – In Colorado, Planned Parenthood Rocky Mountains President Vicki Cowart vowed to reopen the Colorado Springs clinic after a gunman, armed with a semi-automatic rifle, fatally shot three people and wounded nine others two days earlier.
November 29, 2017 – The World Health Organization issued a fact sheet on Violence Against Women : WHO estimates that about 35% of women worldwide have experienced physical and/or sexual violence, most often by an intimate partner. Globally, about 38% of murders of women are committed by male intimate partners. Men are more likely to perpetrate violence if they have low education, a history of mistreatment as children, exposure to domestic violence against their mothers, harmful use of alcohol, unequal gender norms including attitudes of acceptance of violence, and a sense of entitlement over women.
November 29, 2019 – A South Korean court sentenced two K-pop stars to prison for gang raping drunk unconscious women. Judge Kang Seong-soo said that Jung Joon-young, 30, had raped women who were "drunk and unable to resist, filmed them nude ... then spread it on a group chat," and sentenced Jung to six years in prison. Choi Jong-hoon, also 30, was sentenced to five years for rape. Both men are required to go through 80 hours of sexual violence treatment courses, and are banned from working with children. This had been a “hidden crime,” as many of the victims were too shamed to come forward, and feared they would be judged, instead of their attackers. The videos made by Jung were found by police during a separate investigation of Seungri, another star, who was charged with supplying prostitutes to potential business investors.
November 29, 2020 – In 2015, when Angel Gregorio launched her store, The Spice Suite , in Washington D.C., she had no investors or loans. She kept her day job as a high school assistant principal while her store got off the ground, and supplemented its growth with income from two rental properties she kept as a financial cushion. “I didn’t feel like I needed a loan or investors because my plan wasn’t huge,” she says. “We’ve done this solely with the help of Black people.” She’s never even spent a dollar on marketing, though her accountant recommends she start – “for tax purposes,” Gregorio explains. The store is a foodie’s retail paradise, which Gregorio calls “a love letter to Black food and culture.” She offers spice she individually sources from around the world which she blends by hand. Each of her products proudly bears the stamp: “Made by a Black woman in Washington D.C.” Word-of-Mouth brought in enough business from the Black community that the store’s annual net revenue has passed the $1m mark. In 2016, Gregorio launched SpiceGirlin’ – a social enterprise and support system which is an incubator for Black women entrepreneurs. Any Black woman looking to sell uniquely sourced or handmade products can apply. SpiceGirlin’ hosts monthly professional development seminars led by Black women with practical expertise to share. Each session is available at no charge for all SpiceGirlin’ members. Members of the cohort are also invited to hold recurring retail pop-ups out of The Spice Suite, an opportunity to test drive the experience of running a brick-and-mortar. “My business is about supporting Black businesses,” she says. “I think I bust the myth that Black people don’t support Black businesses.” Jamila Lake, now owner and chief designer behind a homewares line, calls SpiceGirlin’ a “free business degree without the student loans” and a judgment-free group of women who understand the grind of running a business. “It’s an amazing feeling to have that many women around you that want to see you win,” says Lake.
November 29, 2021 – Opposition candidate Xiomara Castro of the Libre party had a substantial lead of 53% in the presidential elections in Honduras, but Nasry Asfura of the incumbent National Party, who had only 34 percent, still refused to concede. Castro defied the country's electoral council's call for no candidate to declare victory, telling supporters that she would start forming a national reconciliation government. "We have turned back authoritarianism," said Castro, whose husband Manuel Zelaya was a leftist president deposed in a 2009 coup. "Out with corruption, out with drug trafficking, out with organized crime." On November 30, she was declared the winner, and Asfura conceded. She assumed office on January 22, 2022, as the first woman president of Honduras.
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November 30, 1485 – Veronica Gambara born, Italian political leader and poet; when her husband the Count of Correggio died in 1518, she took over running the city-state, including the condottieri (the military), and turned her court into a salon, drawing important Renaissance thinkers and artists; when the city was attacked in 1538 by the forces of Galeotto Pico II, she organized a successful defense, then oversaw improving the fortifications; 80 of her poems and 150 of her letters have survived.
Veronica Gambara — by Corregio
November 30, 1813 – Louise-Victorine Choquet Ackermann born, French poet and author; Poésies, premières poésies, poésies philosophiques is her most noted work.
November 30, 1843 – Martha Ripley born, American physician, suffragist, and professor of medicine. After establishing a successful practice as an obstetrician, in 1887 she founded the Maternity Hospital in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She spoke out on issues from sanitation and clean water, to raising the age of consent in Minnesota from 10 years old. She campaigned for raising the age to 18, but in 1891 the legislature only raised the age to 14. Ripley was an outspoken women’s rights activist, and a leader in the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). While she was serving as president (1883-1889) of the Minnesota Woman Suffrage Association, she convinced NAWSA to hold their annual meeting in Minneapolis in 1885. She died at age 68 in 1912 from respiratory infection complications and rheumatic heart disease.
November 30, 1873 – Božena Benešová born, Czech author, poet, and playwright, considered at the forefront of psychological prose; known for the Úder trilogy and Don Pablo, Don Pedro and Věra Lukášová.
November 30, 1874 – Lucy Maud Montgomery born, Canadian author who also used the pen name L.M. Montgomery, best known for her Anne of Green Gables series. After her mother died, her father left her on the custody of her maternal grandparents, who raised her in the small community of Cavendish, Prince Edward Island. She was a lonely child, who created imaginary friends and make-believe places, kept a journal, and wrote short stories and poetry. She earned a teacher’s license at Prince of Wales College, then studied literature at Dalhoousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She taught school, but didn’t enjoy it, and spent her free time writing short stories, which were published in magazine and newspapers. In 1897, she accepted a proposal of marriage, but later broke off the engagement because she fell in love with someone else, but he died of influenza. In 1898, she went to live with her widowed grandmother until she died in 1911. From 1901 to 1902, she worked in Halifax as a substitute proofreader for the newspapers Morning Chronicle and The Daily Echo. The press portrayed her as the “ideal young woman author” – a shy school teacher, wanting to write only part-time, her femininity “unspoiled.” The portrait was not much like the real Montgomery, who wrote a friend, "I am frankly in literature to make a living out of it." Shortly after her grandmother’s death, at the age of 37, she married Ewen MacDonald, a Presbyterian minister, with whom she had little in common. The marriage was difficult from the start - the ‘manse’ provided by the church lacked a toilet and bathroom, and her husband became increasingly depressed. Convinced that he was not of ‘the Elect’ chosen by God to go to heaven, he would sit for hours staring into space. He did nothing to help raise their children, and Montgomery suffered from bouts of depression herself. Writing was her solace. She died in 1942 of coronary thrombosis, at the age of 67. Her husband outlived her by about a year.
November 30, 1900 – Mary Lasker born, American health activist, worked with the Birth Control Federation of America (renamed Planned Parenthood in 1942); also lobbied for federal funding for the National Cancer Institute and National Heart Institute.
November 30, 1916 – Andreé de Jongh born, Belgian nurse and artist who during WWII was a Red Cross volunteer who also helped set up safe houses and false identity papers for British soldiers trapped behind enemy lines after the Nazis invaded Belgium. She then organized and led Le Réseau Comète (the Comet Line), a resistance network that helped Allied soldiers and downed airmen escape from the Nazi-occupied country
November 30, 1916 – Dena Epstein born, American musicologist, music librarian, and author; noted for her research on the historic origins of American slave music, author of Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: black folk music to the Civil War;
November 30, 1924 – Shirley Chisholm born, the first African-American woman elected to the U.S. Congress (Democrat-NY, 1969-1983), and the first woman and first African-American Democratic presidential nominee - she received 151 delegate votes at the 1972 Democratic Convention. When she ran for New York state assembly on 1964, she got very little backing from the party, so she appealed directly to women voters, and won the primary in June, then the election with over 18,000 votes more than the Republican and Liberal party candidates. She was a member of the NY State Assembly (1965-1968).
November 30, 1926 – Teresa Gisbert Carbonell born, Bolivian historian of art and architecture, and author, specializing in the Andean region; director of the National Art Museum of La Paz (1970-1976); director of the Bolivian Cultural Institute (1986-1989); president of the International Council on Monument and Sites in Bolivia (1986-1992); her books include Iconografía y mitos indígenas en el arte (Indigenous Iconography and Myths in Art), Arte textil y mundo Andino (Textile Art and the Andean World).
November 30, 1928 – Takako Doi born, Japanese politician; first woman Speaker of Japan’s Lower House, to date the highest position held by a female Japanese politician in the country’s modern history; leader of the Japanese Social Democratic Party (1986-1991); recruited young women with grass-roots activist backgrounds to bring more Japanese women into politics.
November 30, 1929 – Joan Ganz Cooney born, American screenwriter and producer; co-creator of Sesame Street.
November 30, 1931 – Vivian Lynn born, a pioneer in the New Zealand Women’s Art Movement, and helped set up the Women’s Art Archive. Her work included collages, drawings, paintings, printmaking, books, sculptures, photographs, and installations.
‘Merchurochrome’ (1983) — from Vivian Lynn ‘Pharmocopeia’ series
November 30, 1931 – Margot Zemach born, prolific American children’s book illustrator, and author of books often adapted from folk tales; won the 1974 Caldecott Medal for Duffy and the Devil,
November 30, 1933 – Jane Elliott born, American educator known for her "Blue eyes/Brown eyes" exercise, which she first conducted with her third-grade class on April 5, 1968, the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Publication in the local newspaper of compositions the children had written about the experience led to much broader media interest. Invitations to speak and to conduct her exercise eventually led Elliott to give up school teaching and to become a full-time public speaker against discrimination. She directed the exercise and lectured on its effects in many places throughout the world. Elliott began the exercise in 1968 by asking her class how they think it feels to be a black boy or girl. She suggested to the class that it would be hard for them to understand discrimination without experiencing it themselves and then asked the children if they would like to find out. The children agreed, and she divided the class into “Blue Eyes” and “Brown Eyes” groups. At first, there was resistance among the students in the minority group to the idea that brown-eyed children were better than blue-eyed children. To counter this, Elliott lied to the “Blue Eyes” telling them that melanin was linked to their higher intelligence and learning ability. Shortly thereafter, this initial resistance fell away. Those who were deemed "superior" became arrogant, bossy, and otherwise unpleasant to their "inferior" classmates. Their grades on simple tests were better, and they completed mathematical and reading tasks that had seemed outside their ability before. The "inferior" classmates also transformed – into timid and subservient children who scored more poorly on tests, and even during recess isolated themselves, including those who had previously been dominant in the class. These children's academic performance suffered, even with tasks that had been simple before. On the following Monday, Elliott reversed the groups – “Blue Eyes” became “Brown Eyes, and vice versa. While the new “Blue Eyes” did taunt the “Brown Eyes” in ways similar to what had occurred the previous week, Elliott reported it was much less intense. To reflect on the experience, she asked the children to write down what they had learned. The Riceville Recorder ran the children’s compositions under the headline “How Discrimination Feels.” When the story was picked up by the Associated Press, it became national news.
November 30, 1937 – Adeline Yen Mah born in China, Chinese-American physician, anesthesiologist, and author, known for her bestselling autobiographical books, Falling Leaves Chinese Cinderella.
November 30, 1943 – Norma Alarcón born in Mexico, American Chicana feminist, author, publisher, and educator. Founder of Third Woman Press in 1979, and Professor Emerita of Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
November 30, 1945 – Hilary Armstrong born, Baroness Armstrong; British Labour politician; Lord Temporal of House of Lords (2010); Member of Parliament for Durham NW (1987-2010); Minister of various departments, including Minister for Local Government (1997-2001), and Chief Whip of House of Commons/Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury (2001-2006).
November 30, 1950 – Patricia Ann Tracey born, American naval officer; first U.S. woman promoted to the rank of Vice Admiral in 1996; Director of Navy Staff (2001-2004); Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Military Manpower and Personnel Policy, the Pentagon (1998-2001); Director of Naval Training, Office of the Chief of Naval Operations (1996-1998); Commander of the Naval Training Center, Great Lakes (1995-1996).
November 30, 1976 – Marta Burgay born, Italian radio astronomer; discoverer of PSR J0737-3039, first known double pulsar; her thesis on radio pulsars won 2005 Pietro Tacchini Prize, which was awarded by Società Astronomica Italiana.
November 30, 2011 – Hillary Clinton became the first U.S. Secretary of State to visit Myanmar since 1955. It was known as Burma when John Foster Dulles visited in the Southeast Asian nation then. Since a military coup in 1962, the country had been under a brutal authoritarian regime, but new military-backed civilian leadership, and a pro-democracy movement, has brought positive change. During Clinton’s three-day visit, she planned to urge President Thein Sein, and other senior officials, to break off military deals with North Korea. An official aboard Clinton’s plane told reporters, “Our discussions will be around seeking much stronger assurances ... of a determination on the part of the government to discontinue activities that we believe are antithetical to the maintenance of peace and stability.” The situation has since become much worse, beginning in 2016 with increasing evidence of genocide inflicted on the Rohinya people, a minority Muslim group, by the Burmese military. The Rohinya are only 2.1% of the country’s population. Then in February 2021, a coup d'état, which deposed the National League for Democracy, the nation’s ruling party, and declared that power had been transferred to Commander-in-Chief of Defence Services Min Aung Hlaing.
November 30, 2019 – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi led a Democrat-only congressional delegation consisting of 13 House members and one senator to Madrid's COP25 summit. "One of the goals we have is to make sure that all of those who are in the Paris Accord know that the Democratic majority in the Congress of the American people are very concerned about the climate issue, understand that we have to set goals and have a plan on how to achieve them, and to talk about some of the things that we have done," Pelosi said before departure for Spain.
November 30, 2020 – Joe Biden announced his economic team , a slate of advisers which could include the first woman secretary of the treasury , as the president-elect looked to reviving the coronavirus-hit U.S. economy. Biden’s nominee to lead the treasury, Janet Yellen , was chair of the Federal Reserve under Barack Obama and had been confirmed by the Senate before. But Republicans geared up to oppose Neera Tanden , Biden’s nominee for the Office of Management and Budget. Tanden, the president of the liberal Center for American Progress thinktank, had accused Senate Republicans of hypocrisy after they rushed the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, following the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “Neera Tanden, who has an endless stream of disparaging comments about the Republican senators whose votes she’ll need, stands zero chance of being confirmed,” a spokesman for the Texas senator John Cornyn tweeted . Janet Yellen was confirmed, and has served as U.S. Secretary of the Treasury since January 26, 2021. Tanden asked for her nomination to be withdrawn after Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, announced he would not vote for her. She was later appointed as a senior advisor to the president in May 2021, and since October 2021, has been the White House Staff secretary.
November 30, 2021 – In the UK, Nick Kelly, leader of Plymouth city council has been suspended from the Conservative party over “victim-blaming” comments, following the murder of 18-year-old Bobbi-Anne McLeod . “Everybody has a responsibility not to try to put themselves in a compromising position,” Kelly said in an interview two days after her body was found. calling for a “full and proper apology.” They wrote: “… you should be unequivocal on the matter of victim blaming and cognisant of the power of your words. We are asking you, once again, to reflect on what you said and the real distress it has caused. Then, perhaps, you might understand why a full apology and retraction is necessary, highlighting that the actual ‘responsibility’ everyone has is not to harm others.” Sue Dann , deputy leader of Plymouth Labour group and a signatory of the letter, said, “Women quite often get victim-blamed for things that happen to them. This was just a woman standing on the main road, going about her daily life. So councillor Kelly insinuating that people should take responsibility is incredibly irresponsible.”
Bobbi-Anne McLeod — Sue Dann
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The Feminist Cats recommend this thought-provoking essay by Casira Copes:
The Sexist Reason So Many People Hate Cats https://aninjusticemag.com/the-sexist-reason-so-many-people-hate-cats-835a85ecfacb
How could anybody
