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November 11, 1441(?) – Charlotte of Savoy born, she became the second wife of Louis, Dauphin of France in 1451, but it was not a happy marriage. When Louis succeeded his father, Charles VII, in 1461, he abandoned Charlotte in Burgundy, and she had to borrow from Isabella of Bourbon the entourage and carts needed to travel to the French court, but Charles secluded her household at the Château of Amboise. Her library there would become the genesis of the Bibliothèque nationale of France. She nevertheless served as regent during his absence in 1465, and she was a member of the royal regency council during the minority of her son, Charles, until her death at age 42 in December,1483. Her daughter Anne took control of France until the coronation of Charles VIII in 1484.
November 11, 1744 (O.S.) – Abigail Adams born, politically influential First Lady (1789–1797), early advocate for women’s rights; her husband was often away from home due to his political work, so Abigail, who was largely self-educated, oversaw the household and the farm, and raised their four children, while maintaining a lively lifelong correspondence with her husband on the political issues of the day. In addition to women’s rights, she was an advocate for educating girls, and for the abolition of slavery.
November 11, 1866 – Martha Annie Whiteley born, English chemist and mathematician; she was an advocate for women’s acceptance in the field of chemistry, and campaigned for their entry into the Chemical Society. She graduated from the Royal Holloway College for Women in 1890 with a B.Sc. in chemistry from the University of London, and remained there to earn an honor in an undergraduate degree in mathematical moderations from University of Oxford. Whiteley was science mistress as Wimbledon High School (1891-1900). She became science lecturer at a college for women teachers, St. Gabriel’s Training College, Camberwell (1901-1902), while also working on the organic chemistry of barbiturate compounds at the Royal College of Science, and earned her D.Sc. in 1902 from the Royal College of Science; her dissertation was on the preparation and properties of amides and oximes. In 1904, she joined the staff at the College of Science, one of only two women to stay on the professional staff when the college merged with the newly formed Imperial College in 1907. In 1912, Whiteley founded the Imperial College Women’s Association with help from rector Sir Alfred Keogh, an association devoted to helping the women of the college gain equal treatment in the field of chemistry. Whiteley fought for everything from women’s cloakroom facilities at the college to admittance of women into the Fellowship of the Chemical Society, but had only limited success with the society until the passage of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919 ended prohibiting women from professions because of their gender. During WWI, the chemical laboratories at the Imperial College were utilized to analyze samples collected from battlefields and areas that had been bombed. Whitely and her colleagues focused on analyzing lachrymators and irritants. She worked with Frances Micklethwait and six other women scientists in an experimental trench testing mustard gas and explosives. The work was hazardous: Whiteley wounded her arm while testing mustard gas on herself. She also worked on developing syntheses of drugs that had previously been imported from Germany including beta-Eucaine, Phenacetin and Procaine. In 1920, Whiteley received the honor of the Order of British Empire for her scientific contributions to war efforts. Whiteley retired from the Imperial College in 1934, but continued work in editing and contributing to Thorpe’s Dictionary of Applied Chemistry Thorpe’s Dictionary of Applied Chemistry.
November 11, 1891 – Grunya Sukhareva born, Soviet child psychiatrist; noted for being the first to publish a detailed description of autistic symptoms in 1925. It was published in German in 1926, and Sula Wolff translated it into English in 1996; Sukhareva founded a Faculty of Pediatric Psychiatry in the Central Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education. In 1938, Sukhareva led a clinic specializing in childhood psychosis under the Russian SFSR Ministry of Agriculture and Food.
November 11, 1895 – Wealthy Consuelo Babcock born (Wealthy is her first name, not an adjective), American mathematician; received a master’s in 1922 and a doctorate in 1926, both from the University of Kansas, where she taught for 30 years; the university’s Wealthy Babcock Mathematics Library was named in her honor.
November 11, 1896 Shirley Graham Du Bois born, African-American author, playwright, composer, and civil and human rights activist; director of the Chicago Negro Unit of the Federal Theatre Project of the WPA; member of Sojourners for Truth and Justice, which worked for global women’s liberation, and the American Communist Party. She married her second husband, W.E.B. Dubois, in 1951, and they emigrated to Ghana, where he died in 1963. After a coup d’état in 1967, she left, and later became a citizen of Tanzania. Noted for her books There Was Once a Slave, about Frederick Douglass, and Zulu Heart.
November 11, 1914 – Daisy Gatson Bates born, American civil rights activist, publisher, and journalist. She and her husband founded the Arkansas State Press,
November 11, 1915 – Anna Jacobson Schwartz born, American economist, monetary expert and author. She worked at the National Bureau of Economic Research in New York City, and as a writer for the New York Times. She was the co-author with Milton Friedman of A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960, considered one of the most influential economics books of the 20th century.
November 11, 1926 – Maria Teresa de Filippis born, Italian woman pioneer in auto racing, the first woman to race in Formula One. She was active in 1958-1959, participating five times in the World Championship Grand Prix.
November 11, 1930 – Mildred Dresselhaus born, American physicist and academic, known for work on graphite and carbon nanotubes; first woman Institute Professor and professor emerita of physics and electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She won numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Science, the Enrico Fermi Award and the Vannevar Bush Award.
November 11, 1937 – Alicia Ostriker born, American Jewish feminist poet and scholar; professor of English at Rutgers University sine 1972; noted for her poetry collections: Once More Out of Darkness, A Dream of Springtime; The Mother-Child Papers, The Imaginary Lover, Writing Like a Woman, The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Vision and Revisions, For the Love of God.
November 11, 1940 – Barbara Boxer born, American Democratic politician; U.S. Senator from California (1993-2017), who served on the Senate Environment Committee (2015-2017), and as Chair of the Senate Ethics Committee (2007-2015). She was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from California (1983-1993). Boxer was on the Marin County Board of Supervisors (1976-1982), and was the board’s first woman president. She is the author of two novels, A Time to Run, Blind Trust.
November 11, 1942 – Diane Wolkstein born, American folklorist and children’s author; she was New York City’s official Storyteller (1968-1971), and hosted a radio show, Stories From Many Lands . The Magic Orange Tree and Other Haitian Folktales; White Wave: A Chinese Tale; The Red Lion: A Tale of Ancient Persia; The Magic Wings: A Tale from China.
November 11, 1954 – Mary Gaitskill born, American novelist, essayist and short story writer; known for her short story collection, Bad Behavior; her novels, Two Girls, Fat and Thin and Because They Wanted To; and her 1994 essay in Harper’s magazine, “On Not Being a Victim,” about rape.
November 11, 1958 – Kathy Lette born in Australia, became a British citizen in 2011; novelist, newspaper columnist and sitcom writer; noted for her novels Mad Cow, and How to Kill Your Husband (and Other Handy Household Hints).
November 11, 1960 – Cristina Odone born in British Kenya, British-Italian journalist, editor, and author; Founder and CEO of the National Parenting Organization. She had been Editor of The Catholic Herald New Statesman The Shrine; A Perfect Wife; The Good Divorce Guide.
November 11, 1964 – Margarete Bagshaw born, American artist, a descendant of the Tewa people of the Santa Clara Pueblo, granddaughter of noted artist Pablita Velarde; known for her paintings and pottery. Bagshaw died at age 50 in 2015, after a stroke and being diagnosed with brain cancer.
November 11, 1977 – ʼ í faith, and the family left Iran in 1979 to escape persecution, and migrated to Buenos Aires, Argentina. When her parents divorced in 1990s, she and her mother moved to New York. At age 17, Mehran’s permanent visa was revoked for an infraction, and she moved to Ireland. Her debut novel, Pomegranate Soup, was published in 2005. Rosewater and Soda Bread, the sequel to her first book, was published in 2008. She was found dead in her rented house in 2014, but the autopsy was inconclusive. Her third novel, The Margaret Thatcher School of Beauty, was published posthumously.
November 11, 1979 – The Bethune Museum and Archives opens in Washington D.C., a center for African-American women’s history, named in honor of Mary McLeod Bethune.
November 11, 1992 – The General Synod of the Church of England votes to ordain women priests.
1994 Ordination of first women Anglican priests
November 11, 1993 – The Vietnam Women’s Memorial is dedicated in Washington, D.C. after being conceived by former army combat nurse Diane Carlson Evans and sculpted by Glenna Goodacre to honor the thousands of American women who voluntarily served during the Vietnam era. One Army nurse, 1st Lt. Sharon Lane, was killed by enemy fire during a rocket attack in 1969, and seven other U.S. nurses died in-country of illness or injury.
November 11, 2013 – Red Lipstick Day is launched to support the survivors of sexual violence around the world.
November 11, 2013 – Malala Yousafzai ’s memoir, I Am Malala,
November 11, 2019 – Lindy West’s book, The Witches Are Coming, appeared in bookstore windows across the U.S. Noted as “one of the funniest feminists alive today,” West takes on the backlash against the #MeToo movement, plus a whole lot of other contemporary issues, and combines them with episodes from her life.
November 11, 2020 – Georgia became a major battleground state in the 2020 election, mainly because of hard work and fundraising efforts by black women like Stacey Abrams , who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2018, then founded the Fair Fight Initiative, Helen Butler of Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, Nsé Ufot of NewGAProject, Deborah Scott of @GA_STANDUP, and Tamieka Atkins of ProGeorgia — leaders of campaigns that registered 800,000 voters, key to building a new, Democratic coalition in Georgia .
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November 12, 1606 – Jeanne Mance born, French Canadian settler and nurse who was one of the founders of Montreal. After taking patients into her home (1642-1645), she received a contribution that enabled her to found the city’s first hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal in 1645. She returned to France twice to seek financial support for the hospital, and recruited three sisters of the Religieuses hospitalières de Saint-Joseph to provide care for the patients so she could devote more time to directing the operation of the hospital.
November 12, 1651 – Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz born, Hieronymite nun of New Spain, self-taught scholar, feminist philosopher, composer and poet; called “The Mexican Phoenix”; Her criticism of misogyny and the hypocrisy of men led to her condemnation by the Bishop of Puebla, and in 1694 she was forced to sell her collection of books and focus on charity towards the poor; she died the next year from the plague while treating her sister nuns.
November 12, 1815 – Elizabeth Cady Stanton born, American suffragist, abolitionist, and leading figure of the women’s rights movement; She wrote the Declaration of Sentiments for the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention which launched the woman suffrage campaign; president of the National Woman Suffrage Association (1892-1900), but she was also an advocate for women’s parental and custody rights, property, wage and employment rights, divorce and birth control; author/editor of the controversial The Woman’s Bible,
November 12, 1887 – Bertha McNeill born, African-American civil rights activist, newspaper columnist, and educator. She was chair of the Interracial Committee of the Women's International League of Peace and Freedom (WILPF) from 1932 to the late 1950s, and also served as national vice president of WILPF. McNeill was a co-editor of the Journal of the National Association of College Women, and a board member of the Jane Addams Peace Association.
November 12, 1905 – Louise McPhetridge Thaden born, American aviation pioneer, held the women’s records for altitude, endurance and speed; won the first Women’s Air Derby, nicknamed the Powder Puff Derby in 1929, but one pilot was killed, so women were barred from racing from 1930-1935; in 1936, the first year women are allowed in the race, she won the Bendix Trophy Race, setting a new world record of 14 hours, 55 minutes from New York City to Los Angeles, and the pilot Laura Ingalls (not the author) came in second.
November 12, 1941 – Carol Gluck born, American historian, author, and authority on Japan; books including Rekishi de kangaeru Thinking with History Showa: the Japan of Hirohito;
November 12, 1945 – Judith Roitman born, American mathematician specializing in set theory, topology, and Boolean algebra; has run workshops for elementary and high school teachers on teaching mathematics; served in the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics writing group which produced Principles and Standards for School Mathematics; No Face: Selected and New Poems
November 12, 1946 – Alexandra Charles born Thyra Margareta Gefvert, Swedish owner of a series of nightclubs where many Swedish entertainers made their debuts. She is the chair of several charitable foundations, and was awarded a medal in 2015 by King Carl XVI Gustaf for her work for women’s health.
November 12, 1961 Nadia Comăneci born, Romanian gymnast and coach; at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, she became the first gymnast to be awarded a perfect score of 10.0, and won three gold medals. She went on to win a total of nine Olympic gold medals before retiring from competition. In 1989, she defected to the U.S., but after the overthrow of Nicolae Ceaușescu, Romania welcomed her on a visit as a national hero. She has had dual Romanian and U.S. citizenship since 2001, is a sports ambassador for Romania, and a member of the International Gymnastics Federation Foundation. She and her husband Bart Conner own and operate the Bart Conner Gymnastics Academy and the Perfect 10 Production Company. She was an analyst for the 2016 Olympic Games. Comăneci is the founder and main fundraiser for the Nadia Comăneci Children's Clinic in Bucharest which provides low-cost and free medical and social support to Romanian children, and is also involved with the Special Olympics.
November 12, 1962 – Mariella Frostrup born in Norway, Norwegian-Scottish journalist and presenter, best known as a British television and radio presenter of arts programmes. She is an active supporter of Oxfam, Comic Relief and The Children’s Society. Frostrup is a co-founder of the Gender Rights and Equality Action Trust, which works in partnership with grassroots organizations like Femmes Africa Solidarité, which supports women’s empowerment and leadership in building peace.
November 12, 1962 – Naomi Wolf born, American author, journalist, feminist, and former political advisor to Bill Clinton; she was written for The Nation, The New Republic, and The Huffington Post, and is noted for her books The End of America, and Vagina: A New Biography.
November 12, 1964 – Barbara Stühlmeyer born, German musicologist, church musician, and authority on Hildegard of Bingen; since 1995 she has been a contributor and editor of the journal Karfunkel; co-author of Tugenden und Laster (Virtues and Vices), and author of many books on Hildegard von Bingen.
November 12, 1964 – Paula Murphy sets the women’s land speed record 243.44 MPH in Walt Arfon’s 10,000 horsepower, J-46 jet-powered ‘Avenger’ at the Bonneville Salt Flats. “I had to sit with a pillow behind me so I could reach the pedals, which meant that my head was sticking out of the cockpit, and at over 200mph the pressure on your neck muscles is incredible,” she said. “That was a scary ride.”
November 12, 1967 – Iryna Khalip born in Belarus when it was part of the USSR, Belarusian journalist, reporter and editor in the Minsk bureau of Novaya Gazeta, known for her criticism of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. She has been regularly harassed, detained, and beaten by the Belarusian KGB and authorities. In 2011, she was given a two-year suspended prison sentence for her role in protests following the 2010 Belarus election. In 2009, she was awarded the Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women's Media Foundation. She was able to deliver her acceptance speech in New York, but shortly after that, her freedom to travel was revoked.
November 12, 1976 – Judith Holofernes born as Judith Holfeder-Roy, German singer-songwriter known for her lyrics, which often address social issues; lead singer of Wir sind Helden. She is an active supporter of Tibet Initiative, a German campaign for human rights and self-determination in Tibet, and for Viva con Agua, a German charity for global clean drinking water. She performed at an anti-nuclear power demonstration following the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.
November 12, 2010 – Shriti Vadera, Baroness Vadera, G20 adviser, is the co-developer with President Jacob Zuma of South Africa of the Africa Free Trade Area initiative. The G20 is a group of twenty of the world's largest economies that meets regularly to coordinate global policy on trade, health, climate, and other issues. Vadera and Zuma’s proposal would replace the current three distinct free trade areas within Africa with a single free trade entity spanning 26 countries. A battle earlier in 2o10 – in part waged by Vadera – has ensured that the issue of international development is now appearing on the G20's agenda, having previously been seen exclusively as the preserve of the G8. Leaders are expected to agree on a "nine-pillar" plan that to guide in strengthening cooperation between developed and emerging economies. The nine pillars are infrastructure building, trade promotion, human resources development, private investment, job creation, domestic resources mobilisation, growth with resilience efforts, financial inclusion, and knowledge sharing. Vadera, a former investment banker, points out that South Korea is one of only two countries that transformed itself from a low income country to a high-income country in just one generation. She argues that it achieved this not by following the traditional prescriptions of the World Bank or the IMF, but by using international trade as an essential component of its development policy. She argues that it is not enough to rely on aid over the long term; instead, greater reliance on domestic resources is critical to build a more resilient economy and implement a home-grown development agenda.
November 12, 2019 – Ekiti State in southwest Nigeria has adopted a policy to ban the expulsion of girls from schools during and after pregnancy, an important step in ending the longstanding discriminatory practice. Most of Nigeria’s staggering 10.5 million out-of-school children are girls, because of the high adolescent pregnancy rates in Nigeria, with girls between the ages of 15 and 19 accounting for 145 out of every 1,000 births. Ekiti State’s adoption of the “Operation Keep Girls in School” policy is a major first step but more efforts are needed to create awareness of the policy among communities, school management officials, teachers, and girls, and to monitor all the schools to ensure that they are enforcing this important new policy.
Bisi Fayemi, Wife of Ekiti State Governor (left), who has campaigned to keep pregnant Nigerian girls in school
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November 13 , 1715 – Dorothea Erxleben born, first woman medical doctor in Germany, instructed from an early age by her father, she was inspired when Italian scientist Laura Bassi became a university professor to fight for her right to practice medicine. In 1742, she published a tract arguing that women should be allowed to attend university. She became the first German woman to receive a PhD in 1754. After being admitted to study by a dispensation of Frederick the Great, Erxleben received her M.D. from the University of Halle. She went on to analyze the obstacles preventing women from studying, among them housekeeping and taking care of children.
November 13 ,1862 – Mary Kingsley born, English ethnographer, scientific writer and explorer who had training as a nurse; her travels in West Africa, beginning with a four month journey in 1893 from Sierra Leone to Angola, and followed by an 1894-1895 trip which began in Nigeria, where she met the missionary Mary Slessor, then canoeing up the Ogooué River in Gabon, and climbing Mount Cameroon, before returning to England for an extensive lecture tour. Her lectures and the publication of her books, Travels in West Africa, and West African Studies, did much to shape the popular perception in Britain of Africans and Africa.
November 13 , 1869 – Helene Stöcker born in Germany, head of the Bund für Mutterschutz (League for The Protection of Mothers), a pioneering reproductive rights organization that advocates equality under the law for illegitimate children, homes for unwed mothers, sex education, access to contraceptives, legalization of abortion, and the right to divorce. In 1908 it was renamed Bund für Mutterschutz und Sexualreform (adding ‘Sexual Reform’); founder in 1923 of War Resisters International; founding member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.
November 13 , 1869 – Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams born in Russia, liberal politician, writer and feminist; was a leading campaigner for the All-Russian Union for Women’s Equality; left Russia in 1920, disillusioned with communism and socialism, and lived in the UK and the U.S., founding the Russian Liberation Committee, and raising money for Russian orphans.
November 13 , 1876 – Anne Dallas Dudley born, American leader in the Southern U.S. of the campaign for women’s suffrage; in 1911, she became a co-founder and first president of the Nashville Equal Suffrage League; as the league’s president, she organized and led large May Day suffrage parades, and was a major player in bringing the National Suffrage Convention to Nashville in 1914, one of the largest conventions ever held in Nashville up to that time. In 1915, she was elected president of the Tennessee Equal Suffrage Association, and she helped get a suffrage amendment introduced in the legislature to change the state constitution. In spite of the determined campaign she led, the amendment was defeated, but a later measure to give women the right to vote in presidential and municipal elections was eventually passed by the state legislature in 1919. In 1917, Dudley became the 3rd
November 13 , 1886 – Mary Wigman born Marie Wiegmann, German choreographer and dancer, a pioneer of modern dance and of dance therapy. Considered a major figure in the history of modern dance, and an iconic figure of Weimar German culture.
Mary Wigman and her company
November 13 , 1906 – Eva Zeisel born in Hungary, American industrial ceramics designer whose work is included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum, the British Museum, and many other museums around the world. She had been working in the Russian ceramics industry for several years when she was arrested in 1936, falsely accused of participating in an assassination plot against Joseph Stalin. She was held in prison for 16 months, 12 of them in solitary confinement. In September 1937, she was deported to Vienna, Austria. A few months after her arrival in Vienna the Nazis invaded, and she took the last train out. She reunited with her husband-to-be, Hans Zeisel, in England, where they married. They sailed for the U.S. with $67 between them. She got a position teaching at the Pratt Institute in New York. Then in 1942, she was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art and Castleton China to design a set of modern porcelain, undecorated china that would be worthy of exhibition at MoMA, and then produced commercially for sale by Castleton. "New Shapes in Modern China Designed by Eva Zeisel," the first one-woman exhibition at MoMA, opened in 1946, and was widely praised. It established her reputation in the U.S., but wartime constraints on materials delayed production until 1949. It was followed by several decades of very popular modern designs commissioned by international manufacturers of dinnerware and tableware accessories. In the 1980s, a 50-year retrospective exhibit of her work organized by Musée des Arts Décoratifs in partnership with the Smithsonian Institution traveled through the US, Europe and Russia. In 2005, Zeisel won the Lifetime Achievement award from the Cooper-Hewett National Design Museum.
November 13 , 1920 – Guillermina Bravo born, Mexican ballet dancer, choreographer and theatrical director, co-founder of Academia de la Danza Mexicana.
November 13 , 1955 – Whoopi Goldberg born Caryn Johnson, American comedian, actress, author and television host; one of the few entertainers to have won an Emmy, a Grammy, a Tony and an Oscar; advocate for human rights and LGBT rights, and against the use of children in armed conflicts.
November 13 , 1959 – Caroline Goodall born, English screenwriter and actress; has performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre; noted for her screenplays for The Bay of Silence Dreams of Leaving.
November 13 , 1961 – Kim Polese born, American technology executive; Chair of CrowdSmart Inc, a technology-based seed stage investment company, and Chair of ClearStreet Inc, which develops products and tools to help reduce employer and employee spending on healthcare; co-founder and CEO of Marimba with the creators of the Java programming language; recipient of the 2010 Innovator Award from the National Center for Women & Information Technology.
November 13 , 1966 – Susanna Haapoja born, Finnish politician, who served two terms as a Centre Party MP (2003-2009) before her death from a cerebral hemorrhage at age 42.
November 13 , 1967 – Bonnie Ntshalintshali born, South African Artist, noted for vibrant ceramic works and paintings; she had polio as a child, so her mother encouraged her to develop her artistic skills to earn a living; won the Corobrik National Ceramic Award in 1988. Ntshalintshali died from an AIDS-related illness in 1999.
November 13 , 1969 – Ayaan Hirsi Ali born in Somalia, Dutch-American author, scholar, activist, feminist and politician, known for her vocal criticism of Islam, and as an advocate for the rights and self-determination of Muslim women, actively opposing forced marriage, honor killings, child marriage and female genital mutilation. She is the founder of the AHA Foundation, an organisation for the defense of women’s rights. Hirsi Ali immigrated to the U.S. and became a U.S. citizen in 2013. Her 2006 autobiography, Infidel, Nomad
November 13 , 1974 – Karen Silkwood , a technician and union activist at the Kerr-McGee Cimarron plutonium plant near Crescent, Oklahoma, is killed in a suspicious car crash.
November 13 , 1981 – Rivkah born as Rivkah Greulich, American cartoonist and graphic novelist; noted for her teen series Steady Beat.
November 13 , 2014 – Over a three year period, five New Orleans police detectives in charge of investigating sex crimes dismissed 840 out of 1,290 sex crime calls as “miscellaneous” and did no follow-up, according to a city inspector general report; in New York, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance announced that he would dedicate $35 million for helping U.S. prosecutors clear a backlog, testing tens of thousands of rape kits.
Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance wants to clear the backlog of unprocessed rape kits
November 13 , 2014 – A fifth woman came forward to accuse Roy Moore, the Republican Senate candidate in Alabama, of sexually assaulting her when she was a teenager and he was a prosecutor in his 30s. The new accuser, Beverly Young Nelson , said in a news conference that Moore was a regular at the restaurant where she worked at age 16, and that one night he offered her a ride home. She said Moore parked the car and groped her as she fought, and squeezed her neck “attempting to force my head onto his crotch.” Moore called the allegation false and part of a partisan “witch hunt.” The New Yorker
Beverly Young Nelson showing a yearbook picture of herself at age 16
November 13 , 2019 – In the UK, the Center for Women’s Justice , and the End Violence Against Women Coalition (EVAW ), brought legal action against the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), alleging covert changes in practice adversely impacted rape prosecution rates. The Law Gazette published findings of evidence which supports the charges made by the two women’s rights groups. Despite record numbers of rape allegations reported to the police, prosecution rates have fallen to their lowest since records began. In the last three years, the number of convictions has more than halved. This shocking failure of the criminal justice system promoted calls for investigation from women’s organisations throughout the UK, fully supported and endorsed by Rape Crisis England and Wales and Trafford Rape Crisis. In light of the evidence uncovered, the CPS acknowledges the use of ‘conviction levels of ambition’ for rape cases of 61-62%, in a bid to improve their rape conviction rates. The code of practice for prosecutors usually sets this at 50% as standard: “The test ought to be ‘more likely than not’…they are in violation of their own code,” observes Harriet Wistrich, director at the Centre for Women’s Justice . In practical terms, this means that prosecutors were being given a ‘perverse incentive’ to drop ‘weak’ cases and pursue fewer, but stronger, cases in a bid to increase their conviction rate. Tens of thousands of cases may have been dropped as a result of this. Rebecca Hitchen, for EVAW, said: “This is a shocking admission from the CPS, as it acknowledges what we have repeatedly claimed – that performance targets linked to conviction rates will result in CPS prosecutors charging ‘stronger’ cases and dropping ‘weaker’ ones in order to make itself look better. This is why the numbers of rape cases reaching trial has plummeted and why we are judicial reviewing the CPS.” Shadow Attorney General Baroness Shami Chakrabarti declared: “We’ve got to understand that yes, rape cases are some of the hardest, but they are also some of the most serious under criminal law: after murder, what could be more serious? . . . We need a proper investigation into what’s been going on. This is an absolute scandal . . . I am almost shaking in shock at this.”
Rebecca Hitchen, EVAW — Harriet Wistrich, CWJ — Shami Chakrabarti, Shadow Attorney General
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November 14 , 1449 – Sidonie of Poděbrady born, she and her twin sister Catherine were Bohemian princesses. In 1464, Sidonie was married at age 14 to Albert, the son of Frederick II, Elector of Saxony. Four months later, he became Albert III, Duke of Saxony, when his father died, and Sidonie became Duchess consort of Saxony, and later Margravine consort of Meissen. She was against warfare and violence, refusing to accompany Albert when he started wars against Groningen and Friesland, and protested by removing their children from the court to Albrechtsburg Castle. Many of her letters of correspondence have been preserved, in which she pleads for the release of prisoners. In September 1500, Albert died, leaving Sidonie a widow. She withdrew from the Saxon court and spent the rest of her years in Tharandt, near Dresden, where she died in February 1510 at the age of 60.
November 14 , 1501 – Anna of Oldenburg born, Countess consort of East Frisia who became Regent of East Frisia (1540-1561) as the guardian of her sons during their minority. She tried to maintain religious tolerance, allowing Catholics and Spiritualists to practice their faith. Only under pressure from Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, did Baptism become forbidden in East Frisia in 1549. Anna also founded the police force (1545) and reformed the legal system in East Frisia. In addition to its administrative tasks, the Chancellery was given judiciary tasks. Councillors and legal scholars were added to the Chancellery to carry out these tasks. The Chancellery was mostly a court of appeals, but would also act a court of first instance in cases involving the nobility. In 1558, Anna abolished the law of primogeniture (the firstborn son’s right of succession), and established that each of her three sons would share power. This was an attempt to maintain religious balance, and to limit the growing influence of Sweden during protracted negotiations for the marriage of her eldest son Edzard and princess Katharina Vasa of Sweden, which finally took place in 1559. When Count John II “the Mad” of Harlingerland seized a strip of East Frisian land at the Accumer Deep, Anna took her case to the Reichskammergericht and to the Lower Rhenish-Westphalian Circle. The Circle arrested John, who had made many enemies, and he died in captivity in 1562. Her division of power was not a success. Her middle son died in 1566, and the remaining brothers were locked in a power struggle, which weakened their rule, but strengthened the nobility, and the citizens of Emden, center of the Protestant Reformation in East Frisia. Anna died at age 73 in September 1575.
November 14 , 1805 – Fanny Mendelssohn born, German pianist and composer who composed over 460 pieces of music, mostly lieder and piano pieces. Her younger brother was Felix Mendelssohn, and a number of her pieces were published under his name because of her family’s reservations, and the societal bias against women. In 1846, she published a collection of songs under her own name as Opus 1. She died suddenly of a stroke in 1847, at age 41.
November 14 , 1856 – Madeleine Lemoyne Ellicott born, American woman suffragist; she wanted to be a doctor, but her father disapproved, so she studied chemistry at Rushe Medical School, and the Polytechnic in Zurich Switzerland. But after her return, she was unable to find an American school which would accept a woman student in the field. She turned to the cause of women’s rights, especially getting the vote. Ellicott was one of the organizers of the Pan-American Conference of Women in 1922. She was a founding member of the League of Women Voters in 1920, then founded the LWV chapter in Maryland, serving as its president for 20 years. Ellicott also campaigned for the creation of a Juvenile Court system in Maryland. She died in 1945, at age 88.
November 14 , 1878 – Julie Manet born, French painter, artist’s model, art collector and diarist; Growing Up with the Impressionists.
Julie Manet — ‘Self-Portrait with Laërtes the Dog’ — ‘Julie Manet with Cat’, painted by Auguste Renoir
November 14 , 1889 – Pioneering journalist Nellie Bly (born Elizabeth Cochrane) begins her challenge: to beat the fictional Phileas Fogg’s record, going around the world in less than 80 days. She completes the trip in 72 days, 6 hours and 11 minutes.
November 14 , 1903 – The U.S. Women’s Trade Union League is established, after it became clear at a Boston meeting of the American Federation of Labor that the AFL had no intention of including women within its ranks. Labour leaders Mary Kenney O’Sullivan and Leonora O’Reilly , with settlement workers Lillian Wald and Jane Addams helped found the WTUL, and by 1904 the organization had branches in Chicago, New York City, and Boston. From the beginning the organization had a strong reformist agenda, working to provide working women with educational opportunities while also striving to improve working conditions. The organization achieved its greatest successes during the presidency of social reformer Margaret Dreier Robins . From 1907 to 1922, under Robins’s leadership, the organization fought for an eight-hour workday, the establishment of a minimum wage, the end of night work for women, and the abolition of child labour. During the garment industry strikes of 1909-1911, league members marched side by side with striking workers and helped set up strike funds. After the disastrous 1911 Triangle shirtwaist factory fire in New York City, league members conducted a four-year investigation of factory conditions that helped establish new regulations. The league was seriously weakened by financial problems during the Great Depression, and never fully recovered. In 1950, the WTUL had to be dissolved.
Women’s Trade Union League of New York
November 14 , 1906 – Louise Brooks born, actress, dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies, and silent film star in American and German films (Pandora’s Box Diary of a Lost Girl, Lulu in Hollywood
November 14 , 1907 – Astrid Lindgren born, Swedish children’s author, best known for her Pippi Longstocking series.
November 14 , 1920 – Mary Greyeyes born, a member of the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation and the first First Nations woman to join the Canadian Armed Forces, serving in the Canadian Women’s Army Corps (1942-1946); a publicity picture of her in uniform brought her much attention; at the end WWII, Indigenous people who served in the Canadian military were offered the choice to give up their treaty rights and Indian status in return for the right to vote, and she was urged to visit a polling station and have her picture taken voting, but she pointed out the unfairness of the voting laws and refused. First Nations people didn’t get the right to vote in Canada until 1960.
Mary Greyeyes — Canadian WWII publicity photo
November 14, 1921 – Ea Jansen born in Estonia, Finno-Ugric historian; most of her research focused on the national awakening of Estonia, and she made substantial contributions to the knowledge of this period; taught at the Tallinn Pedagogical University.
November 14, 1922 – Veronica Lake born, American actress whose long ‘peek-a-boo’ hair was so copied that she changed her hairstyle during WWII to help prevent women working in wartime factories from catching their hair in the machinery. Her struggles with alcohol hurt her later career. In 1946, she earned a pilot’s license, and later flew solo between Los Angeles and New York. Noted for her frank memoir, co-written with Donald Bain, Veronica: The Autobiography of Veronica Lake.
November 14 , 1934 – Catherine McGuinness born, Irish jurist and politician; represented the University of Dublin in the Seanad Éireann (Ireland’s Senate – 1979-1981 and 1983-1987); first woman Judge of the Circuit Court (1994-1996); Judge of the High Court (1996-2000); Judge of the Supreme Court (2000-2006); President of the Law Reform Commission (2005-2011); Member of the Council of State since 2012.
November 14 , 1939 – Wendy Carlos , born Walter Carlos, American musician and composer noted for electronic music and film scores, particularly featuring the Moog synthesizer.
November 14 , 1944 – Karen Armstrong born, British author and commentator; a former Roman Catholic religious sister; noted for her books on comparative religion and as a writer and presenter for BBC Channel Four; A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
November 14 , 1945 – Louise Ellman born, British Co-operative Member of Parliament for Liverpool Riverside since 1997; as a member of the Labour Party, she was elected as a councilor on the Lancashire County Council in 1970, and was its leader from 1981 to 1997.
November 14 , 1946 – Emily Greene Balch , co-founder of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, becomes a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. She donated her share of the Nobel Peace Prize money to WILPF. As a delegate to the International Congress of Women at The Hague in 1915, she had played a prominent role in several important projects: as a founding member of the Women’s International Committee for Permanent Peace, later renamed the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom; prepared peace proposals for consideration by the warring nations; served on a delegation, sponsored by the Congress, to the Scandinavian countries and Russia to urge their governments to initiate mediation offers; and wrote, in collaboration with Jane Addams and Alice Hamilton, Women at The Hague: The International Congress of Women and Its Results (1915)
November 14 1950 – Sarah Radclyffe born, British film producer; co-founder of Working Title Films; noted as executive producer on Caravaggio, Wish You Were Here, A World Apart, Les Misérables (1998), and The War Zone.
November 14 1956 – Babette Babich born, American philosopher; noted for her studies of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Anders, Adorno, and Hölderlin, and work in aesthetics, including philosophy of music, life-size bronzes in antiquity (Greek sculpture), and continental philosophy, especially the philosophy of science and technology. Babich has also made substantive contributions to scholarly discussion of the role of politics in institutional philosophy (the analytic-continental divide) as well as gender in the academy.
November 14 1956 – Valerie Jarrett born, American public servant in the Obama Administration; Director of the U.S. Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs (2009-2017), and Senior Advisor to the President (2009-2017); previously served in various positions in the mayor’s office in Chicago (1987-2005); was a member of the Chicago Stock Exchange (2000-2007), and served as its chair (2004-2007).
November 14 1960 – Six-year old Ruby Bridges becomes the first black child to desegregate an all-white elementary school, in New Orleans, Louisiana. In 2005, formerly all-white William Frantz Elementary School was put on the National Register of Historic Places.
‘The Problem We All Live With’ — painting by Normal Rockwell of six-year-old Ruby Bridges on her way to school, being escorted by US Marshalls because of threats against her
November 14 1962 – Laura San Giacomo born, American actress, noted for her portrayal of Maya Gallo in the TV series Just Shoot Me! Sex, Lies and Videotapes; Pretty Woman; Quigley Down Under. th
November 14 1967 – The Columbian Congress declares Día de la Mujer Colombiana ‘La Pola’ , Policarpa Salavarrieta , a Neogranadine seamstress-turned-spy for the revolutionary forces fighting against the Spanish, who was caught and executed.
Policarpa Salavarrieta — watercolor by José María Espinosa
November 14 1972 – Lara Giddings born, Australian Labor politician; Premier of Tasmania (2011-2014); Deputy Premier of Tasmania (2008-2011); Treasurer of Tasmania (2010-2014); Member of the Tasmanian Parliament (1996-1998 and 2002-2018).
November 14 1983 – The British government announces that 96 Tomahawk cruise missiles, part of a planned NATO deployment, were arriving at Greenham Common air base; thousands of women protesters who were camped outside the gate staged a massive lie-in to block the entrance.
November 14 2017 – Australians overwhelmingly supported gay marriage in a historic non-binding vote, clearing the way for Parliament to make same-sex marriage legal in the country. In the survey, 61.6 percent voted yes and 38.4 percent voted no, officials announced. Turnout was 79.5 percent. “The Australian people have spoken, and they have voted overwhelmingly ‘yes’ for marriage equality,” said Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Supporters burst into cheers in public squares as the result was announced. “Finally I can be proud of my country,” said Chris Lewis, 60, an artist from Sydney. “No” advocate Lyle Shelton, a Christian lobbyist, said he would “accept the democratic decision.”
November 14 2019 – Representatives in the Ohio state legislature, Ron Hood and Candice Keller, sponsored House Bill 413 which, among other provisions, sought to legally recognize unborn fetuses as people, and define abortion as murder, according to a news release from the Right to Life Action Coalition of Ohio, obtained by The Washington Post. Anyone who performs an abortion, according to the release, would be “subject to already existing murder statutes.” It was referred to the legislature’s Criminal Justice Committee, which to date has taken no further action. Current laws already in effect in Ohio: Require a patient to receive state-directed counseling designed to discourage them from having an abortion, and a 24 hour waiting period before the procedure. Counseling must be provided in person and must take place before the waiting period begins, necessitating two trips to the facility. Health plans offered in the state’s health exchange under the Affordable Care Act can only cover abortion in cases of life endangerment, or in cases of rape or incest; public funding is available for abortion only in cases of life endangerment, rape or incest. A parent of a minor must consent before an abortion is provided. Most patients must undergo an ultrasound before obtaining an abortion, since the provider must test for a fetal heartbeat. Abortion may be performed at 20 or more weeks postfertilization (22 weeks after the last menstrual period) only in cases of life endangerment or severely compromised health — based on the assertion, inconsistent with scientific evidence and rejected by the medical community, that a fetus can feel pain at that point in pregnancy. Abortion clinics are required to meet unnecessary and burdensome standards related to their physical plant, equipment and staffing.
2019 — Pro-Choice Demonstrators in Ohio
November 14 2019 – In Florida, a state Senate committee delayed a vote on legislation that would require minors to obtain parental consent before receiving an abortion , but the delay appears temporary, even though similar legislation passed in 1988 was ruled unconstitutional by the Florida Supreme Court under the Florida state constitution’s right to privacy, which is stronger than in the U.S. Constitution. But Republican Governor Ron DeSantis appointed three new justices to the court shortly after taking office in January 2019, and Republicans see the court’s shift to the right as an opportunity to pass anti-choice legislation.
2019 — Florida Pro-Choice Activists against parental consent bill
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November 15, 1607 – Madeleine de Scudéry born, French writer and salon host; often published her work under her brother’s name; her 10-volume novel Artamène, ou le Grand Cyrus,
November 15, 1849 – Mary E. Byrd born, American astronomer who used photography to determine cometary positions, and a pioneer in astronomy teaching at the college level, designing a method of teaching astronomy as a laboratory science combined with field work, and writing one of the first teacher training manuals on the subject; She was the director of the observatory at Smith College (1887-1906), but resigned her position because she disapproved of Smith College accepting money from Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.
November 15, 1873 – Sara ‘Doctor Jo’ Baker born, American physician and medical inspector for the New York City Department of Health, fought against urban poverty and ignorance to save newborns and children; a pioneer in preventative medicine; invented a safe infant formula which helped women return to work and support their families, an eye drop system to prevent infants from becoming blind as a result of transmitted gonorrhea, and safety lessons and licenses for midwives which reduced childbirth fatalities. She said it was more dangerous to be a child in Hell’s Kitchen than it was to be a soldier on the front lines of World War I, as their mortality rate was three times higher; she tracked down Mary Mallon, better known as ‘Typhoid Mary,’ twice. She was the author of Fighting for Life, a memoir about her crusade to transform New York from an incubator for disease into the “healthiest city on earth.”
November 15, 1887 – Georgia O’Keeffe born, one of America’s foremost 20th .” In 2014, O'Keeffe's 1932 painting Jimson Weed sold for $44,405,000, more than three times the previous world auction record for any woman artist.
‘Red Poppy’ — Georgia O’Keeffe: 1946 portrait by by Cecil Beaton
November 15, 1887 – Marianne Moore born, influential American poet and translator; in 1952, her book, Collected Poems, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and the National Book Award for Poetry.
November 15, 1916 – Nita Barrow born, Barbadian nurse, midwife, instructor, humanitarian activist, public servant, and politician; the first woman Governor-General of Barbados (1990-1995). She was Ambassador to the UN (1986-1990); served as a public health advisor to the World Health Organization and the Pan-American Health Organization (1963–1975). Barrow was Jamaica’s first Principal Nursing Officer (1956); the first West Indian Matron of the University College Hospital (1954); and an instructor at the West Indies School of Public Health (1945-1950).
November 15, 1932 – Petula Clark born, English vocalist, composer and actress; her singing career began at age nine, during WWII, performing for the studio audience at a BBC radio broadcast delayed by a bombing raid; she became part of a WWII troupe entertaining the troops, making hundreds of appearances, often with another child performer, Julie Andrews.
November 15, 1934 – Joanna Barnes born, American actress, novelist, and journalist; she appeared in over 20 films, including playing Gloria Upson in 1958’s Auntie Mame, and later was a frequent guest star on series television shows in the 1960s. In the 1970s and 1980s, she wrote several novels, including The Deceivers and Pastora , was a book reviewer for the Los Angeles Times, and wrote a syndicated column called, “Touching Home.”
November 15, 1939 – Rauni-Leena Luukanen-Kilde born, Finnish physician and author; her family fled to Sweden during WWII, and she was raised in Helsinki. She studied medicine at the universities of Oulu and Turku, graduating in 1967. She was at one point the only medical practitioner at the hospital in Pelkosenniemi, performing dental and veterinary work as well. In March 1975, she became a provincial medical officer in Rovaniemi, Lapland, where she later became chief medical officer. After a car accident in 1995, she began writing books about UFOS, and claimed to have been rescued from danger by extraterrestrials.
November 15, 1954 – Emma Dent Coad born, British Labour politician; Member of Parliament for Kensington (2017-2019). Dent Coad has been a Kensington and Chelsea Borough Councilor for Golborne since 2006.
November 15, 1958 – Lesley Laird born, Scottish politician; Deputy Leader of the Scottish Labour Party since June 2018; Member of the Scottish Parliament for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath since 2017.
November 15, 1960 – Dawn Airey born, British media company executive, CEO of Getty Images (2015-2018); she held senior positions at ITV, and was CEO and Chair of Channel 5 (2000-2002).
November 15, 1962 – Judy Gold born, American comedian, television writer and producer; won 2 Daytime Emmys for her writing and producing on The Rosie O’Donnell Show.
November 15, 1967 – Cynthia Breazeal born, computer scientist known for her pioneering work in social robotics and human-robot interaction; Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
November 15, 2013 – Janet Yellen , President Obama’s nominee to replace Ben Bernanke as Federal Reserve chair, testifies before the Senate Banking Committee. The Senate confirmed her nomination, and she served as Chair of the Federal Reserve from 2014 to 2018.
November 15, 2018 Protests erupted in Belfast, Cork, Dublin and Limerick , with hundreds of women and men calling for a national reckoning over how sexual assault cases are handled after Irish defense lawyer Elizabeth O’Connell in her closing argument asked the jury to consider a 17-year-old’s underwear. “Does the evidence out-rule the possibility that she was attracted to the defendant and was open to meeting someone and being with someone? You have to look at the way she was dressed. She was wearing a thong with a lace front . . .” Prosecutors said the teen was raped in a muddy alley by the accused, a 27-year-old man who was unanimously acquitted by a jury of eight men and four women.
November 15, 2019 Marie Yovanovitch, American Ambassador to Ukraine (2016-2019) and senior member of the U.S. Foreign Service until she retired in 2020, told impeachment investigators that she was “shocked and devastated” by Donald Trump’s personal attacks on her, and “amazed” that corrupt elements in Ukraine had found willing American partners to take her down in a conspiracy-driven smear campaign.
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November 16, 1528 – Jeanne d’Albret born, became Jeanne III, queen regnant of Navarre; a spiritual and political leader of the French Huguenots; after the Huguenot defeat in 1569, she negotiated the Peace of Saint-Germain-en-Laye with Catherine de’ Medici, arranging a marriage between her son, Henry, and Catherine’s daughter, Marguerite; she died during preparations for the wedding in 1572, which started an unsubstantiated rumor that Catherine de’Medici had her assassinated by means of poisoned gloves.
November 16, 1806 – Mary Tyler Peabody born, one of the Peabody sisters of Massachusetts; author, teacher, translator, abolitionist and suffragist; she taught young children in her school in Salem, and wrote educational works for children and parents, including The Flower People: Being an Account of the Flowers by Themselves; Illustrated with Plates, a popular storybook which introduced children to horticulture; married at age 36, she was the second wife of the education reformer and politician Horace Mann; she promoted the writing and speaking career of Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, who was the first Native American woman known to copyright and publish work in the English language.
November 16, 1851 – Minnie Hauk born as Amalia Mignon Hauk, American operatic soprano; she made her New York debut in 1866, and appeared as Juliet in the American premiere of Gounod's Roméo et Juliette in 1867. She then went to Europe, singing at London’s Covent Garden, in Paris, and at the Grand Opera in Vienna. In Brussels, she played Carmen in the first major successful production of Bizet’s opera, and reprised the role in its English and American premieres in 1878. Carmen in four languages. She died in Switzerland at age 78 in 1929.
November 16, 1896 – Joan Lindsay born, Australian novelist, playwright, essayist, and visual artist; best known as the author of Picnic at Hanging Rock.
November 16, 1897 – Leonore Goldschmidt born, German Jewish teacher who helped her students escape from the Holocaust. She had earned a doctorate from Heidelberg University, and taught languages until 1933, when she lost her position at the Sophie-Charlotte-Gymnasium in Berlin-Charlottenburg because of the ban on Jews and “politically unreliable” people from civil service, including teaching in public schools. In 1934, she worked at a private Jewish school. In 1935, she used an inheritance, which sadly came to her after her cousin, Dr. Alexander Zweig, was murdered by the Nazis, to set up her own private school for Jewish children, because there was a loophole in the repressive laws, which meant she could teach Jewish children privately. The school had 520 students and 40 teachers by 1937. Her curriculum had an intense focus on teaching the children English, which was vital for their coming life in exile. After much red tape, the Private Jüdische Schule Dr. Leonore Goldschmidt (Private Jewish School Dr. Leonore Goldschmidt) was granted an official license to run Abitur exams in 1936. school became an Examination Centre of the University of Cambridge. The bilingual final examination enabled the students to enter English language universities in Europe and North America, making their emigration easier. After November 9, 1938, when the Nazis unleashed Kristallnacht, many of her students fled from Germany with their families. After the school was officially shut down in September 1939, the Goldschmidt family emigrated to England together with 80 students and some teachers. They reopened their school in Folkestone, and continued until May 1940. Afterwards, Goldschmidt worked as a teacher at several private and state-funded schools in England until 1968 . After her retirement, she studied Russian and lived in London until her death in 1983.
November 16, 1899 – Mary Margaret McBride born, radio interview show host and writer; dubbed “the First Lady of Radio,” her popular program, under various names as she changed networks, lasted over 40 years; she accepted advertising only for products she was willing to endorse from personal experience, turned down all tobacco and alcohol products, and “broke the color line” during WWII by bringing black interviewees on to her radio show.
Eleanor Roosevelt interviewed by Mary Margaret McBride
November 16, 1900 – Eliška Junková aka Elisabeth Junek born, Czechoslovak automobile racer; considered of one the greatest women drivers in Grand Prix history; she was one of the first drivers to walk the course before a race, noting landmarks and the best lines through corners. In 1926, she won the two-liter sports car class at the Nürburgring, in Germany, the first woman to win a Grand Prix event. When her husband was killed in a crash at the German Grand Prix in 1928, she retired from racing.
November 16, 1903 – Barbara McLean born, pioneering American film editor; she edited 62 films, including Mary Pickford’s early talkies, and The Black Swan 12 O’Clock High All About Eve Wilson.
November 16, 1915 – Jean Fritz born to Presbyterian missionaries in China, where she attended a British school until her family emigrated to the U.S. when she was 12; American children’s author, whose career began with short stories published in children’s magazines; her first book, Bunny Hopwell’s First Spring, was published in 1954. Many of her other books were about American history. Her autobiography, Homesick: My Own Story (1983), was a Newbery Honor Book, and won a National Book Award; in 1983, she was honored with the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award for career contribution to American children’s literature; she lived to age 101.
November 16, 1935 – Elizabeth Drew born, American author, journalist and political pundit; the Washington correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly The New Yorker, Meet the Press, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer; On the Edge: The Clinton Presidency Richard M. Nixon
November 16, 1940 – Donna McKechnie born, American musical theatre dancer, singer, actress and choreographer; best known for her performance as Cassie in the musical A Chorus Line, for which she won the 1976 Tony Award for Best Actress in Musical. In March 1973, she choreographed and performed in the highly acclaimed one-night-only concert Sondheim: A Musical Tribute at the Shubert Theatre in New York. In recent years, she has toured in her one-woman show Inside the Music. McKechnie’s autobiography, Time Steps: My Musical Comedy Life, was published in 2006.
Donna McKechnie — ‘The Music and the Mirror’ from ‘A Chorus Line’
November 16, 1945 – Lynn Avery Hunt born, American historian, author and academic; wrote several books on the French Revolution, including Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution Inventing Human Rights: A History,
November 16, 1946 – Barbara M. Smith born, African American lesbian feminist, socialist, activist lecturer, author, and publisher. She played a significant role in U.S. Black feminism, and the publishing of women writers of color. In 1980, she was the founder with Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, Hattie Gossett, Susan L. Yung, June Jordan, and Gloria Anzaldúa, of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, and served as its first editor and publisher. Many of Kitchen Table’s publications became standard texts in women’s studies and Black studies programs. She coined the term “identity politics.” In 2005, she was elected to the Albany, New York, city council (2005-2009). The African American Policy Forum honored her in 2017 with its Harriet Tubman Lifetime Achievement Award. Her twin sister Betty is a Black feminist health advocate.
November 16, 1948 – Bonnie Greer born in Chicago, black American playwright, novelist, and broadcaster, who has lived in the UK since 1986, and became a British citizen in 1997. Her plays include Munda Negra Dancing On Blackwater Marilyn and Ella (2005), based on Ella Fitzgerald’s exclusion by the color bar and Marilyn Monroe’s help in getting her employment at the Mocambo nightclub. Greer’s musical memoir of growing up in Chicago, Obama Music,
November 16, 1952 – Robin McKinley born, American author of fantast and children’s fiction; noted for The Blue Sword; the Newbery Award winner The Hero and the Crown; and Sunshine , which won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award.
November 16, 1954 – Andrea Barrett born, American novelist and short story writer; her story collection, Ship Fever, won the 1996 National Book Award for Fiction.
November 16, 1964 – Valeria Bruni Tedeschi born, Italian-French screenwriter, actress and film director. Her debut film as a director, It’s Easier for a Camel . . ., A Castle in Italy,
November 16, 1968 – Shobha Nagi Reddy born, Indian politician from Andhra Pradesh; as a candidate of the Telugu Desam Party, she was elected to a State Assembly seat four times, the first woman to be elected to the legislature in Andhra Pradesh; she lost when she ran for a seat in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India’s bicameral Parliament. She was killed at age 45, when the vehicle she was traveling in overturned, while she was campaigning for the 2014 state assembly elections.
November 16, 1988 – In the first open election in more than a decade, voters in Pakistan elect populist candidate Benazir Bhutto as the first woman Prime Minister of Pakistan (1988-1900 and 1993-1996).
November 16, 2018 – Senior women BBC journalists have made a complaint to BCC executives about presenter Andrew Neil, after he failed to apologise for his Twitter post calling Observer journalist Carole CadwalladrThis Week. Carole Cadwalladr’s investigation of Cambridge Analytica was a major key in exposing the company’s harvesting of data from 87 million Facebook users without their consent, used in 2016 by both the Trump presidential campaign and the Brexit campaign. She was honored for her reporting with the British Journalism Awards’ Technology Journalism Award in 2017, and the Orwell Prize for Political Journalism in 2018. After multiple complaints, Neil deleted his tweet, which echoed the barrage of derogatory names she has been called by Arron Banks, the biggest donor to the Brexit campaign. The BBC women journalists, who declined to be identified because of potential repercussions, said this was not enough and confirmed complaints had been made to executives about the “sexist” comments on Neil’s combative Twitter account, which he often uses to promote pieces published by the rightwing magazine The Spectator.
November 16, 2019 – Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley , founder of the Leadership Council for Women in National Security, was the keynote speaker at the 5th Annual Women, Peace and Security Symposium at Texas A&M University. “Being underestimated can actually be a benefit because you are challenged and you can rise to the task. We know now that if you always bring the same people to the table, you will get the same results,” she said, then added, “Only 5 of 57 key defense positions in the U.S. are held by women, less than 8 percent of the flag officers in the military are women, only one-third of the positions in the State Department are held by women, and the list goes on and on.” During her 30-year career in diplomacy, Abercrombie-Winstanley was the longest serving U.S. ambassador to the Republic of Malta, played a key role as the Secretary of State’s Special Assistant for the Middle East and Africa, and was the first woman to lead an American diplomatic mission to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
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November 17, 1558 – Queen Mary I dies, and Elizabeth I becomes Queen (1558-1603), England’s last ruler from the House of Tudor.
November 17, 1769 – Duchess Charlotte Georgine of Mecklenburg-Strelitz born, who became Duchess of Saxe-Hidburghausen by marriage; a notable patron of the arts, she brought musicians, painters and poets to the court of Saxe-Hidburghausen. Also known for giving half her annual income to the poor and pensioners, and for education and apprenticeships for children of lower class families. She died in 1818 at age 48, after surviving 12 pregnancies. Seven of her children lived to adulthood.
November 17, 1866 – Voltairine de Cleyre born, American anarchist and Freethought movement activist; prolific writer, poet, and public speaker, who opposed capitalism, the state, marriage, and domination over women’s lives and sexuality by religion. She served for a time as editor of the freethought newspaper The Progressive Age. In her 1895 lecture entitled Sex Slavery, de Cleyre condemns ideals of beauty that encourage women to distort their bodies and child socialization practices that create unnatural gender roles. She denounces prostitution, but her main focus is on marriage laws that allow men to rape their wives without consequences. Such laws make "every married woman what she is, a bonded slave, who takes her master's name, her master's bread, her master's commands, and serves her master's passions." She died at age 45 in 1912, from septic meningitis. Though she and Emma Goldman often disagreed, they respected each other, and a collection of de Cleyre’s essays were published posthumously in Goldman’s magazine Mother Earth in 1914.
November 17, 1878 – Grace Abbott born, American social worker, advocate for the rights of immigrants, and for child labor laws. She worked at Hull House, and wrote weekly articles for the Chicago Evening Post The Immigrant and the Community (1917), written while she was director of the Immigrants’ Protective League in Chicago.
November 17, 1880 – The first four women graduate from London University , with Bachelor of Arts degrees – but their names aren’t listed!
London University
November 17, 1903 – Molly Spotted Elk , christened Molly Alice Nelson; Penobscot dancer, actress, and writer. She was born on the Penobscot Indian Island Reservation, in Maine. She toured in Vaudeville shows, dancing her tribe’s traditional dances, creating her own costumes and music. She won a Native American dance contest in Oklahoma, and was adopted by the Cheyenne, who gave her the name Spotted Elk. She moved to New York in 1926, and worked many different jobs before landing a place in the chorus line of the Foster Girls. While touring with the company, she wrote poetry, adventure stories, and other fiction. In 1930, she appeared as Neewa, in The Silent Enemy, a rare silent film featuring Native American performers playing Indians, about the Ojibwe tribe before the arrival of European settlers. In 1931, she moved to Paris, and performed traditional American Indian dances. She married French journalist Jean Archambaud, and began researching folktales and traditions of Northeastern American tribes. When the Depression made earning a living in Paris untenable, she moved back to New York, where she gave birth to a daughter. She was reunited with Archambaud in 1938, but she and her daughter became separated from him during the Nazi invasion of Paris. They escaped, and eventually made their way on foot through the Pyrenees Mountains into Spain, but never saw Archambaud again. They returned to the U.S. and settled on the Penobscot Reservation. She died at age 73 in 1977. Among her published works are From Poverty in Old Town, Maine, to Fame in Paris — and Back; and Penobscot: Culture & History of the Nation.
Penobscot: Culture &
November 17, 1917 – Ruth Aaronson Bari born, American mathematician; graph theory and algebraic homomorphisms; earned her MA at Johns Hopkins University in 1943, but had originally enrolled in the doctoral program; the university suggested that women in the graduate program should give up their fellowships so men returning from WWII could study; she acceded, marrying Arthur Bari, and raising their three children. Bari returned to Johns Hopkins in 1966, where she completed her dissertation on “absolute reducibility of maps of at most 19 regions” at the age of 47. In the early 1970s, she felt that math teachers in the Washington DC public schools were not as prepared as they should be, so she got a grant from the National Science Foundation to create and fund a pilot program for a master’s degree in teaching mathematics.
November 17, 1923 – Ruth Bleier born, American n europhysiologist, feminist scholar, and social justice activist. She earned her MD from Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1949, and interned at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, then practiced medicine in Baltimore’s inner city. Bleier was an advocate for civil rights and ending the Korean War in the 1950s, which led to a subpoena from the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAAC). When she refused to cooperate, she was blacklisted, lost her hospital privileges, and was unable to practice medicine. In 1957, she went to Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine to study neuroanatomy, and completed her post-doctoral fellowship in 1961. She taught psychiatry and physiology at the Adolph Meyer Laboratory of Neuroanatomy until 1967, when she joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison department of Neurophysiology, and also worked with the Wisconsin Regional Primate Center, becoming known as an authority on the animal hypothalamus. In the 1970s, Bleier saw how the biological sciences were affected by sexism and other cultural biases, and argued against the idea of sociobiology as an explanation of conventional gender roles. She also campaigned to improve women’s access and advancement in higher education. Her work demonstrated how gender, sexuality, and science, rather than being static and judgment-free, are constantly changing in response to social values and ideas. Noted for her books, Science and Gender: A Critique of Biology and Its Theories on Women , and Feminist Approaches to Science. Bleier was a founding member of the Association of Faculty Women at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which challenged the administration to reassess the status and salaries of women instructors campus-wide, and to rectify inequalities. In 1975, she helped establish the Woman’s Studies Program, and served as its chair (1982-1986). Bleier came out as a lesbian after her marriage ended in divorce, and campaigned for lesbian rights within the women’s movement. She and her partner, Dr. Elizabeth Karlin, were activists for abortion rights. Bleier died from cancer at age 64 in 1988.
November 17, 1942 – Dame Lesley Rees born, British professor and endocrinologist; Dean of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical College (Bart’s) from 1989–95, the first and only woman to hold this post; now Emeritus Professor of Chemical Endocrinology at Bart’s; she was the first Director of Education at the Royal College of Physicians in 1997. Her Handbook of Paediatric Nephrology
November 17, 1945 – Lesley Abdela born, British expert on women’s rights and representation; adviser in 40 different countries to governments and IGOs (including the UN), NGOs, and the European Commission; broadcast journalist and public speaker; in the 1990 Queen’s Birthday Honours, appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire for “services to the advancement of Women in Politics and Local Government.”
November 17, 1955 – Yolanda King born, American activist and actor, oldest child of Coretta Scott King and Martin Luther King Jr.; acted in Ghosts of Mississippi Our Friend, Martin Selma, Lord, Selma
November 17, 1956 – Angelika Machinek born, German glider pilot, dramaturge, and writer; she was the German gliding champion five times, and broke nine Fédération Aéronautique Internationale Traven und Max Stirner. Machinek was killed in 2006 at age 49 when her microlight plane crashed.
November 17, 1964 – Susan Rice born, American public servant; U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (2009-2013); National Security Advisor (2013-2017). In 2012, she was nominated for Secretary of State after Hillary Clinton retired, but withdrew her name from consideration because of the ongoing Benghazi controversy, saying if she were the nominee, “the confirmation process would be lengthy, disruptive and costly.”
November 17, 1965 – Amanda Brown born, Australian singer-songwriter with The Go-Betweens, violinist and composer; noted for film and television soundtracks. She volunteers for the children's program Free Arts in New York.
Amanda Brown — publicity photo of the Go-Betweens
November 17, 1966 – Sophie Marceau born, French actress, director, screenwriter, and author; wrote and directed Speak to Me of Love (Parlez-moi d’amour), Trivial (La disparue de Deauville).
November 17, 1969 – Rebecca Walker born, American author, feminist, and activist; co-founder of the Third Wave Foundation, which supports efforts of young women of color, and queer, intersex, and trans individuals as activists and leaders in their communities.
November 17, 1978 – Rachel McAdams born, Canadian actress and environmental activist; she was a volunteer for the clean-up efforts after Hurricane Katrina and the 2010 Gulf of Mexico spill, and also participated in the Canada for Haiti telethon in 2010. She is an active participant in the Food & Water First Movement, and narrated the 2014 feature documentary Take Me to the River,
November 17, 1985 – Carolina Neurath born, Swedish journalist and writer. She writes business articles for the Stockholm newspaper Svenska Dagbladet (Swedish Daily News). Neurath has written books on bank failures and venture capitalism, and a novel called Fartblinda, a thriller about a woman journalist uncovering the business of shady financiers, that became the basis of a television series of the same name, which premiered in 2019.
November 17, 2019 – Maria Ressa , journalist, co-founder and CEO of Rappler, arrived in Iceland, scheduled to speak at the Reykjavík Global Forum: Women Leaders 2019. Rappler is a Philippine online news website, whose license was revoked after it ran stories critical of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs,” which has resulted in the deaths of thousands of Filipinos, with evidence sometimes falsified by police to justify the killings, and the rise of fake news stories related to Duterte on social media. She and her team also received death threats after Duterte falsely claimed in a speech that Rappler was owned and controlled by foreigners.
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November 18, 1630 – Eleonora Gonzaga born, Princess of Mantua, Nevers and Rethel; she received an excellent education, was fluent in French, Spanish and Italian, well versed in literature, music and art, and an expert in dances and embroidery. By adolescence, she was writing poetry of a philosophical or religious nature. She became the second wife of Ferdinand III in 1651, becoming Holy Roman Empress, German Queen, and Queen consort of Hungary and Bohemia. She founded a literary academy and was also a patron of musical theater. As Holy Roman Empress, she promoted the development of the cultural and spiritual life at the Imperial court in Vienna, and despite being a staunch Catholic and benefactress of several monasteries, she had a tolerant attitude towards Protestantism. Eleonora founded two women’s honorary orders, the Order of Virtuosity (1662), and the Order of the Starry Cross (1668), for noble ladies, to encourage piety and charitable works, but she also encouraged interest in science. After her husband’s death in 1657, she assumed guardianship of both her children and her stepchildren. Her small court as Empress Dowager was a meeting place for politicians and diplomats, and her stepson, Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I, often consulted her on both personal and political matters. She became a mediator in 1669 during a conflict between Pope Clement IX and Leopold over the appointment of a Cardinal for the Imperial Court. Eleanora died in Vienna in December, 1686 at the age of 56.
Eleonora_Gonzaga of Mantua, Holy Roman Empress — by Frans Luycx
November 18, 1825 – Susan Tolman Mills born; with her husband Cyrus, co-founded Mills Seminary, a boarding school for young women, which became Mills College, the first women’s college in California; in 1890, she became the college’s president, hiring architect Julia Morgan in 1904 to design six buildings to expand the campus; she retired in 1909 at the age of 84.
November 18, 1857 – Rose Markwood Knox born, with her husband Charles Knox, developed the world’s first pre-granulated gelatin, eliminating the difficult process of making gelatin at home; when her husband died in 1908, Rose Knox ran the company for the next 40 years. She was the chair of the Knox Board of Directors until she died at age 93.
1927 Knox Gelatine ad — Rose Markwood Knox
November 18, 1861 – ‘Dorothy Dix’ born as Elizabeth M. Gilmer , but known by her pen name, American journalist and advice columnist, the highest paid and most widely read American woman journalist of her time, with an estimated 60 million readers. In a column called The Ordinary Woman, she wrote, “Women who are toiling over cooking-stoves, slaving at sewing-machines, pinching and economizing to educate and cultivate their children . . . the Ordinary Woman is the real heroine of life.” But Dix also encouraged women to work outside the home. In 1902, she spoke at the 34th annual National American Suffrage Convention in Washington DC. Her speech, “The Woman With the Broom,” filled four columns in the Woman’s Journal, and she appeared in 1903 on a platform with Susan B. Anthony campaigning for woman suffrage. Dix wrote a circular for the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) outlining the social, political and economic reasons why women should be granted the right to vote, which addressed issues like the effect of political questions on women and their homes, taxation, morals, household budgets, and education.
November 18, 1869 – The American Woman Suffrage Association is formed by Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, and other more conservative women’s rights activists, to work exclusively for woman suffrage by focusing on amending individual state constitutions, instead of a Federal Constitutional Amendment.
November 18, 1872 – Beebe Steven Lynk born, one of the first African-American women chemists and chemistry teachers; she earned a degree in Pharmaceutical Chemistry from the University of West Tennessee (then a two-year, pre-bachelor degree for teachers) in 1903, and became one of the two women faculty members (out of 10) at UWT’s new medical school, where she taught Latin botany and materia medica (collected knowledge of healing properties of various substances); author of Advice to Colored Women, published in 1896; active in the National Federation of Women’s Clubs, and an advocate for women’s rights.
November 18, 1872 – In Rochester, New York, Susan B. Anthony and 14 other women are arrested for voting in the U.S. presidential election of 1872. The ballot also included candidates running for seats in the U.S. Congress. Anthony, with 14 other women, had successfully registered to vote several days before the election, but Sylvester Lewis, a poll watcher, challenged Anthony’s qualifications as a voter. The inspectors of election took the steps required by state law when a challenge occurred: they asked Anthony under oath if she was a citizen, if she lived in the district, and if she had accepted bribes for her vote. Following her satisfactory answers to these questions, the inspectors placed her ballots in the boxes. On November 15, warrants were issued by U.S. Commissioner William Storrs for the arrest of all the women, based on the complaint by Lewis. A deputy federal marshal called on Anthony three days later, and asked her to accompany him downtown to see the commissioner. She asked, “What for?” He said, “To arrest you.” When she asked if this was the way he arrested men, he said no, and she demanded that she should be arrested properly. Anthony was taken at government expense on the streetcar to the commissioner’s office, where she met her attorney, Henry Selden, and an assistant U.S. attorney, John Pound. When Pound asked for Anthony’s plea, Selden refused to enter one before an indictment. This obliged the commissioner to conduct an examination, which would determine if there were sufficient grounds to detain Anthony. In what became a pattern of singling out Anthony, all the women voters were arrested, but only Anthony’s actions were examined for evidence of a crime.
November 18, 1878 – Soprano Marie Selika Williams becomes the first Black performer to be invited to perform at the White House, for President Rutherford B. Hayes and First Lady Lucy Webb Hayes.
November 18, 1878 – Georgia Bullock born, first woman member of the Los Angeles Bar Association; first woman attorney to defend a client charged with murder; founder of the Women Lawyer’s Club of Los Angeles; first woman to serve as a judge of the Los Angeles Women’s Court; the first woman California Superior Court judge (1931-1955).
November 18, 1882 – Frances Gertrude McGill born, pioneering Canadian forensic pathologist, pathologist, criminologist, and allergist; earned her medical degree at the University of Manitoba in 1915, then became the provincial bacteriologist (1918) and pathologist (1920) of Saskatchewan, working closely with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and local law enforcement for over 30 years. She traveled across the province conducting forensic examinations, and was an active supporter for establishing the first RCMP forensic laboratory (1937). A newspaper dubbed her the “Sherlock Holmes of Saskatchewan.” She became the forensic lab’s second director (1943-1946), and also trained new Mounties in forensic methods of detection, and in medical jurisprudence. After she left the director position, she was appointed as Honorary Surgeon, and continued as a consultant until her death in 1959.
November 18, 1888 – Frances Marion born as Marion Owens, author, film director and screenwriter; first writer to win two Academy Awards, Best Adaptation for The Big House The Champ; The Scarlet Letter The Wind
November 18, 1904 – Esther McCoy born, American author and architectural historian. She studied at the University of Michigan, and in 1925 went to New York, where she wrote short stories for The New Yorker and Harper’s Bazaar, as well as novels, and screenplays. She also wrote for Left publications like Direction, and United Progressive News. In 1932, suffering from pneumonia, she came to Los Angeles to recuperate. She bought a bungalow in Santa Monica, and lived there for the rest of her life, although she traveled widely. During WWII, she worked as a draftsman for architect R.M. Schindler, after being discouraged from applying to USC’s architecture school because of her age and gender. She became a frequent contributor to the magazines like Arts & Architecture, Architectural Record, and L’Architectura, and wrote about architecture for The Los Angeles Times. In 1960, she published her first major book on architecture, Five California Architects, which was followed by books sponsored by Arts & Architecture devoted to case study houses of architects like Richard Neutra, Craig Ellwood, and Calvin C. Straub. She also wrote extensively on Italian architecture. Her work helped bring modern architecture in Southern California to the attention of the world. McCoy died at age 85 in 1989.
November 18, 1914 – Bettie Cilliers-Barnard born, South African painter and teacher, noted for her symbolic and non-figurative art.
Bettie Cilliers-Barnard: Abstract — and ‘Wash Day’
November 18, 1924 – “Lise” Østergaard born, Danish psychologist and Social-Democratic politician; Minister of Culture (1980-1982), and chaired the 1980 UN World Conference on Women in Copenhagen; Minister without Portfolio (1977-1980); member of the Folketing (Danish Parliament – 1979-1984); spokesperson for the Danish Refugee Council (1974-1977); first woman to become professor of clinical psychology at Copenhagen University (1963); head of psychology at Copenhagen’s Rigshospitalet (State Hospital – 1958); published Den psykologiske testmetode og dens relation til klinisk psykiatri (The Psychological Test Method and its Relationship to Clinical Psychiatry)
November 18, 1928 – Sheila Jordan born, American Jazz singer-songwriter. She pioneered a bebop and scat jazz singing style with an upright bass as the only accompaniment. Charlie Parker called her “the singer with the million dollar ears.”
November 18, 1932 – Amy Johnson , British aviator, who already held several solo flying records, arrives in Cape Town, South Africa, from England, breaking her previous record by over ten hours.
November 18, 1936 – Suzette Haden Elgin born; author and PhD in linguistics; founder of the Science Fiction Poetry Association; creator of the language Láadan for her feminist Native Tongue science fiction series. Also noted for The Ozark Trilogy.
November 18, 1939 – Margaret Atwood , Canadian author, poet, and critic; among her 16 novels to date, she is particularly notable for her iconic novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Blind Assassin, The Testaments, the best-selling sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale.
November 18, 1939 – Margaret Jay, Baroness Jay of Paddington born, English BBC television journalist and politician, Minister for Women (1998-2001), Leader of the House of Lords and Lord Privy Seal (1988-2001).
November 18, 1945 – Wilma Mankiller born, Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation (1985-1995), community organizer.
November 18, 1948 – Ana Mendieta born in Cuba, American performance artis t, painter, sculptor, and video artist, who came to the U.S. as a refugee in 1961. She died in 1985 when she either fell or was pushed from the window of her 34th floor apartment in Greenwich Village, New York. Carl Andre, her husband of eight months, who was the only other person in the room, was tried but was acquitted of murder, on grounds of reasonable doubt, due to lack of witnesses or conclusive evidence. Her death remains an open question – accident, suicide, or murder? Feminists have continued to stage protests at exhibits of Carl Andre’s work.
November 18, 1960 – Yeşim Ustaoğlu born, Turkish producer-director-screenwriter, who made several award-winning shorts before her feature film debut in 1994, Iz The Trace). Günese Yolculuk (Journey to the Sun) Bulutlari Beklerken (Waiting for the Clouds), Pandora’nin Kutusu (Pandora’s Box), Araf (Somewhere in Between), Tereddut (Clair Obscur).
November 18, 1964 – Rita Cosby born, American television news anchor and correspondent; CBS Inside Edition (2007 to present); author of a biography of Anna Nicole Smith, Blonde Ambition, and a book about her father, a WWII Polish Resistance fighter, Quiet Hero: Secrets From My Father’s Past.
November 18, 1981 – Maggie Stiefvater born, American author of Young Adult fantasy fiction; noted for her two series, The Wolves of Mercy Falls The Raven Cycle.
November 18, 2003 – The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court rules 4–3 in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional , giving the state legislature 180 days to change the law, making Massachusetts the first U.S. state to grant marriage rights to same-sex couples.
November 18, 2019 – In New York City, hundreds of farmworkers and their family members marched with allies to the Manhattan offices of Trian Partners, one of the largest shareholders of the fast-food giant Wendy’s. The farmworkers are demanding Wendy’s sign onto the Fair Food Program, which would require the fast-food giant to purchase tomatoes from growers that follow a worker-designed code of conduct that includes a zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment and abuse in the fields. Wendy’s is the only major fast-food chain that has refused to sign onto the Fair Food Program. Comedian and supporter Amy Schumer spoke at the farmworkers’ rally, “. . . you are not alone. Actors and comedians, here in New York, in Hollywood, all around the United States, know about your struggle. And you’re fighting for your children. I know a lot of your own family members have struggled in the fields and at work. And we’re with you, and we’re going to fight and bring more and more awareness to this fight. There’s no excuse for Wendy’s having not joined the Fair Food Program.”
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November 19, 1828 – Lakshmibai born, Maharani of the princely state of Jhansi in Northern India. She became one of the leading figures of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, and a symbol of resistance against the British Raj for Indian nationalists. Just before her husband died, he adopted a child as his heir in the presence of the British political officer, to whom he gave a letter instructing that the child be treated with respect and that the government of Jhansi should be given to his widow for her lifetime. Because the boy was adopted, the British East India Company applied the Doctrine of Lapse, rejecting the child’s claim to the throne, and annexing the state to its territories. Lakshmibai was given an annual pension and ordered to leave the palace and the fort. When the 1857 rebellion started in Meerut, the Rani got permission from the British political officer to raise a body of armed men for her protection. The city was still relatively calm, but the Rani conducted a Haldi Kumkum History of the Indian Mutiny:
November 19, 1845 – Agnes Giberne born in India to a British officer and his wife, prolific English novelist and science writer. The family returned from India either in late 1847 or in 1848. Agnes and her sister Eliza were educated privately by governesses and special masters. At age seven, she began writing stories which she shared with Eliza. By age 17, her short stories were being published in magazines. under her initials “A.G.” Her first children’s book, A Visit to Aunt Agnes, was published in 1864, and sold for two shillings. The first book published under her name was The Curate’s House. Her books for children were in the Victorian evangelical genre, emphasizing the children’s faults and the need for salvation. She also wrote historical novels, mostly set in England or France. But she is most remembered for her books which popularized the sciences, especially astronomy, many of them written for teenagers or children. However, her 1879 best-seller, Sun, Moon and Stars: Astronomy for Beginners, was popular with all ages, and was reissued in a revised edition in 1903. She died at age 94 in 1939.
November 19, 1868 – 172 women suffragists attempted to vote in Vineland, New Jersey, in the presidential election to test Constitution’s 14th Amendment which states, "no State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States." The suffragists, including four African American women, were turned away, so they cast their votes in a women's ballot box overseen by 84-year-old Quaker Margaret Wilson Pryer ( .
Vineland Women’s Ballot Box — Margaret Wilson Pryer
November 19, 1873 – Elizabeth Henderson McCombs born, New Zealand politician of the Labour Party. Though New Zealand women had won the right to vote in 1893, they didn’t win the right to run for office until 1919. In 1921, she became the second woman elected to the Christchurch City Council (1921-1935), and in 1926 became as one of New Zealand’s first women Justices of the Peace. McCombs had run for parliament in 1928 and 1931, but had lost both races. In 1933, she finally won, the first woman elected to the Parliament of New Zealand, serving as the representative for Lyttelton from 1933 to 1935. She promoted equal pay for women, changes to the unemployment benefits, which were more generous for men, and recruitment of women into the police force. Her sisters were also notable. Christina Henderson was a leader in the New Zealand women’s suffrage movement as a founding member the National Council of Women, and an advocate for Prohibition. She fought for equal pay for women teachers. Stella Henderson was the first woman parliamentary correspondent for a major New Zealand newspaper. Stella was not allowed to sit with the male correspondents in the Press Box, who vociferously objected to a woman’s presence, so she bought a permanent ticket for the Ladies Gallery and wrote her notes on her knees – eventually, after complaints from her employer, a section of the Ladies Gallery was converted into a press box for her.
Henderson sisters: Elizabeth - Christina - Stella
November 19, 1876 – Tatyana Afanasyeva born, Russian-Dutch mathematician and physicist who contributed to the fields of statistical mechanics and statistical thermodynamics; co-authored The Conceptual Foundations of the Statistical Approach in Mechanics
November 19, 1895 – Louise Dahl-Wolfe , American photographer, famed for her work which appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, Sports Illustrated, and Vogue.
Louise Dahl Wolfe self-portrait - Bazaar 1952 cover
November 19, 1900 – Anna Seghers born as Anna Reiling, German author; joined the Communist party of Germany in 1928, and wrote Die Gefährten The Seventh Cross , Freies Deutschland Free Germany The Seventh Cross
November 19, 1901 – Nina Bari born, Soviet mathematician, one of the first women accepted to Moscow State University’s Department of Physics and Mathematics; known for work on trigonometric series.
November 19, 1910 – Gladys Lounsbury Hobby born, American microbiologist whose research played a key role in the development and understanding of antibiotics. Her work took penicillin from a laboratory experiment to a mass-produced drug during WWII. Hobby graduated from Vassar in 1931, earned a PhD in bacteriology from Columbia in 1935, while working for Presbyterian Hospital and the Columbia Medical School (1934-1943). She went to work for Pfizer Pharmaceuticals in 1944, where
November 19, 1917 – Indira Gandhi born as Indira Nehru, Indian politician, first woman Prime Minister of India (1966-1977 and 1980-1984). She was assassinated in October 1984. She had previously served as Minister of Defense (1980-1982), Minister of Home Affairs (1970-1973), Minister of Finance (1969-1979), and Minister of Information and Broadcasting (1964-1966). Indira Gandhi was her father’s personal assistant, during Jawaharlal Nehru’s tenure as India’s prime minister (1947-1964).
November 19, 1919 – Lolita Lebrón born, Puerto Rican nationalist. When she was 18 years old, her political views were radicalized because of the 1937 Ponce massacre – a group of demonstrators from the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party were killed during a peaceful protest. She moved to New York City, where she worked as a seamstress, but lost several jobs because she vocally protested discrimination against Puerto Rican workers. By 1946, she had joined the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, and influenced the party to support more involvement for women in politics, and support for economic and social reforms to help end discrimination against women. In May, 1948, a bill was introduced before the Puerto Rican Senate which would restrain the rights of the independence and nationalist movements on the island. The Bill, often called the "Ley de la Mordaza" (gag law), made it illegal to display a Puerto Rican flag, to sing a patriotic tune, to talk of independence, or to fight for the independence of the island. The Bill, which resembled the anti-communist Smith Law passed in the United States, was signed into law on June 10, 1948, by the U.S.-appointed governor of Puerto Rico. In November, 1950, there were a series of armed uprisings in Puerto Rico. An attempt to reach Harry S. Truman with a letter from the leader of the Nationalist Party resulted in a shoot-out which killed one of the nationalists, and was labeled an assassination attempt. The survivor eventually received a presidential pardon. After Puerto Rico became a commonwealth of the U.S., Lebrón and several others attacked the U.S. House of Representatives on March 1, 1954, firing weapons and injuring five lawmakers, one of them seriously. When Lebrón was arrested, she shouted, "I did not come to kill anyone, I came to die for Puerto Rico!" She served 25 years of a 50 year sentence for attempted murder and conspiracy, but was pardoned in 1979 by President Jimmy Carter.
November 19, 1920 – Gene Tierney , American stage and film star, notably in Laura, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Leave Her to Heaven Advise and Consent, Toys in the Attic.
Portrait of Gene Tierney as the title character in the 1944 film ‘Laura’
November 19, 1924 – Dame Margaret Turner-Warwick born, British physician and thoracic specialist; first woman president of the Royal College of Physicians (1989-1992).
November 19, 1932 – Eleanor F. Helin born, American astronomer, principal investigator of the Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking (NEAT) program of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory; she discovered several comets, and was the discoverer or co-discoverer of over 900 numbered minor planets and asteroids.
November 19, 1937 – Penelope Leach born, British psychologist and author specializing in child development and parenting; author of Your Baby and Child: From Birth to Age Five.
November 19, 1939 – Jane J. Mansbridge born, American political scientist; she is the Charles F. Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Noted for her contributions to democratic theory, feminist scholarship and the empirical study of social movements and direct democracy. Her publications include Beyond adversary democracy, Why we lost the ERA, Negotiating agreement in politics.
November 19, 1942 – Sharon Olds born, American poet who won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Stag’s Leap, The Dead and the Living. Ladies' Home Journal. Satan Says, The Nation,
November 19, 1956 – Eileen Collins born, American astronaut, first woman Space Shuttle pilot, and first female commander of a U.S. Spacecraft, logging a total of 537 hours in space.
November 19, 1956 – Ann Curry born on Guam, American television journalist who has reported from war zones in Syria, Palestine, Darfur, Congo, Central African Republic, Kosovo, Israel, Lebanon, Afghanistan. and Iraq.
November 19, 1957 – Ofra Haza born, Israeli singer-songwriter and actress. Her signature song was Shir Ha'frecha ("The Bimbo Song"). She died at age 42 of AIDS-related pneumonia.
November 19, 1958 – Annette Gordon-Reed born, American historian and Harvard law professor; her book, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy
November 19, 1958 – Isabella Blow born, English magazine editor, whose career was mainly at Vogue Tatler The Sunday Times Style
November 19, 1962 – Jodie Foster born, American actress, director, and producer; winner of two Best Actress Oscars and two Golden Globes, for The Accused The Silence of the Lambs. Mayberry R.F.D., Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore Taxi Driver. The Accused Little Man Tate, The Beaver, Money Monster.
November 19, 1967 – Randi Kaye born, American television news journalist; currently an investigative reporter for the CNN program Anderson Cooper 360°.
November 19, 1984 – Brittany Maynard born, American activist for the right-to-die, and legalization of assisted dying, after she was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. She moved from California to Oregon after being given a prognosis of six months to live in April, 2014, and ended her life on November 1, 2014, in accordance with Oregon state law regarding death with dignity. In response to criticism of her decision by the Pope and the National Right to Live Committee, Maynard’s mother responded, "My twenty-nine-year-old daughter's choice to die gently rather than suffer physical and mental degradation and intense pain does not deserve to be labeled as reprehensible by strangers a continent away who do not know her or the particulars of her situation." In part because of Maynard’s videotaped message made shortly before her death, California has since passed an act which allows terminally ill adults to self-administer lethal drugs under limited and specific circumstances.
November 19, 2001 – The World Toilet Organization started World Toilet Day to highlight the 2.4 billion people living without a toilet, with the goal of preventing the spread of diseases like cholera, typhoid and hepatitis, as well as ensuring that women and children are not at risk of assault or rape because they lack indoor toilets.
November 19, 2019 – In the UK, the leaked results of an independent review chaired by maternity expert Donna Ockenden for NHS Improvement shows that at least 42 babies and three mothers died preventable deaths, and 52 other babies suffered brain damage after being deprived of oxygen, in the wards of a hospital in Shropshire between 1979 and 2017. This is described as the largest maternity scandal in the history of the National Health Service , and more affected families are coming forward with their stories. Ocenden said, "It is important that families understand that the further back in time we go, the less likely we are to be able to access health records since health records in the NHS are routinely kept for 25 years. After that time it is unlikely we will be able to access records. Please be assured, however, that your story will be heard and we will continue to try and get you the answers you deserve."
Donna Ockenden of NHS
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November 20, 1784 – Marianne von Willemer born, Austrian actress, dancer and poet, best known for her friendship with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and her appearance in his poetry. At the age of 14, she moved to Frankfurt am Main. In 1814, at age 29, she became the third wife of Frankfurt banker and writer Johann Jakob von Willemer, 25 years her senior, who introduced her to Goethe. Goethe’s twelve-book cycle of poems, West–östlicher Divan , was inspired in part by their correspondence, especially Zuleika in Buch Suleika (Book of Zuleika). The poems to the East Wind and the West Wind in West–östlicher Divan were written by Marianne von Willemer, but this was not revealed until just before her death at age 76 in 1860, 28 years after Goethe had died.
November 20, 1850 – Charlotte Garrigue born, American feminist and humanitarian who married Czech statesman Tomáš Masaryk in 1878. He added her surname to his, becoming Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. After their marriage, Garrigue was involved in social and humanitarian causes in Prague. With Karla Máchová, a leader of the Czech woman’s suffrage movement, she organized a lecture series for women on socialism, and advocated women’s equality. The Garrigue Masaryk family was separated during WWI, as he went into exile with their daughter Olga, traveling to gain support from world leaders for the independence of Czechoslovakia, while she and their other children remained in Prague, under “police supervision.” In 1915, their son Herbert died of typhus, while daughter Alice, a sociology professor, was arrested, then kept under house arrest, but taught classes in her home. At the end of the war, the family was reunited, and Masaryk served as the first President of Czechoslovakia (1918-1935). In 1923, Charlotte Garrigue Masaryk died at age 72, after suffering from cardiac problems.
November 20, 1857 – Helena Westermarck born, Finnish artist and writer who was a Swedish speaker and worked for long periods in France; noted for her realistic style of portraiture. At the 1889 Exposition Universelle, she received honorable mention for her painting Strykerskor. later she became ill with tuberculosis, and gave up painting, turning to writing as a critic and biographer, especially of notable Finnish women, regarded as significant contributions to Finnish culture and history.
Self-portrait — by Helena Westermarck
November 20, 1858 – Selma Lagerlöf born, Swedish author and educator; first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1909). Noted for her novels Gösta Berlings saga (The Story of Gösta Berling); and Herr Arnes penningar (Herr Arne's Hoard).
November 20, 1869 – Zinaida Gippius born, Russian poet, novelist, playwright, editor and religious thinker, a major figure in the Russian symbolism movement; when writing critical essays early in her career, she often used male pseudonyms. While she and her husband, author Dmitry Merezhkovsky, were critical of Tsarism after the 1905 Revolution, and spent a lot of time out of Russia for the next several years, they denounced the 1917 October Revolution as a cultural disaster, and emigrated to Poland, then France, and later Italy. Her poetry is considered her greatest contribution.
November 20, 1885 – Olive Wetzel Dennis born, American engineer whose railway passenger travel design innovations included: seats that partially reclined; stain-resistant upholstery in passenger cars; larger dressing rooms for women, supplied with free paper towels, liquid soap and drinking cups; ceiling lights that could be dimmed at night; individual window vents (which she patented) to allow passengers to bring in fresh air while trapping dust; and air-conditioning the compartments. Her design patents were signed over to the railroad, so for many years, her contributions were not credited to her.
November 20, 1896 – Rose Pesotta born in Ukraine to a family of Jewish grain merchants; American anarchist, feminist, and labor organizer. Beyond her childhood schooling, she read books in her father’s library, some of which first exposed her to anarchism. Her parents tried to arrange a marriage for her in 1913, but she refused, instead emigrating at age 16 to New York City, where she worked as a seamstress in a shirtwaist factory. In 1914, Pesotta joined the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, becoming heavily involved in activism and educating seamstresses. She was also a regular contributor to union and anarchist publications, in both Yiddish and English, including the anarchist newspaper Road to Freedom. Pesotta also attended summer schools at Bryn Mawr and Wisconsin in 1922 and 1930, and Brookwood Labor College, a school to train labor activists (1924–1926). In the 1920s, she became an ILGWU staff member, and traveled as an organizer. In 1933, she was sent to Los Angeles to organize garment workers, who were mostly Mexican immigrants, labeled as “unskilled workers” so employers could pay them much less. Pesotta, Anita Andrade Castro, and other ILGWU leaders rallied them to strike for 26 days in 1933, one of the most influential strikes in Los Angles after passage of the New Deal’s National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which enforced living wages and the right to bargain collectively. After this success, she was appointed as vice-president of the union in 1934. Later, when the press ignored one of her garment worker strikes in favor of showing the spring fashion shows, she dressed her workers in the very evening gowns they had made, and stole headlines with a high-fashion picket line in front of the Biltmore Hotel. But after working extensively with Los Angeles Local 484 while they were organizing, when she sought to manage the local, ILGWU president David S. Dubinsky rejected her request. Pesotta resigned from the union’s staff, in her resignation letter stating that the "men to whom I have been so useful" did not seem "to recognize the fact that I was competent" to manage locals. In 1944, she turned down a new term on the executive board, saying she could not be the only woman on the board when 85% of the union’s membership were women. She returned to work as a seamstress, and published two memoirs, Bread Upon the Waters, and Days of Our Lives. She died of cancer at age 69 in 1965.
November 20, 1897 – Germaine Krull born in Posen, then Germany, now Poznań, Poland; photographer, political activist, and hotelier. She was a pioneer in avant-garde photomontage. Born to a German family which moved frequently, she was schooled by her father, an engineer and free thinker, who let her dress as a boy when she was a child. She spent two or three years (1915-1917 or 18) at a photography school in Munich, then opened her own studio there, specializing in portraits. Her involvement in the Communist Party of Germany led to her arrest and then expulsion from Bavaria in 1920. She went to Russia, was imprisoned there as an “anti-Bolshevik” and expelled from there too. She resumed her photographic career in Berlin (1922-1925), moved to Amsterdam, then to Paris, where she entered a marriage of convenience with Dutch communist filmmaker Joris Ivens (1927-1943) to get a Dutch passport. She shot fashion photography, nudes and portraits, and published her best-known work, Métal, a portfolio of industrial landscapes, bridges and metal objects in 1928. After that, she worked mostly in photojournalism for French publications like Vumagazine until the mid-1930s, when she moved to Monte Carlo. In the 1940s, she traveled in Brazil, French Equatorial Africa and spent months in Algiers. After WWII, she traveled in Southeast Asia, where she became a part-owner of the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok, Thailand, and stayed there until 1966. Next, while in Northern India, she converted to the Sakya school of Tibetan Buddhism. Her last major publication was a 1968 book, Tibetans in India, which included a portrait of the Dalai Lama. After a stroke, she was in a nursing home in Germany, and died in 1985.
‘Self-Portrait — Paris’ (1917) — by Germaine Krull
November 20, 1900 – Helen L. Bradley born, British painter and illustrator of Edwardian scenes.
‘Our Christmas Ducks’ — by Helen L. Bradley
November 20, 1903 – Alexandra Danilova born in Russia, American prima ballerina and choreographer. she was a soloist at the Mariinsky Theatre, but joined Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and never returned to Russia. After Diaghilev’s death in 1929, she became the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo’s prima ballerina. In 1933, she made her American debut, and made several tours of the U.S., Europe, and Asia. She later served as choreographer for the Metropolitan Opera, and influenced several generations of dancers as a beloved teacher at the school of American Ballet. She died in 1997.
November 20, 1907 – Fran Allison born, American radio and television comedian, singer, and host; best known for the weekday puppet show, Kukla, Fran and Ollie (1947-1957), and the CBS Children’s Film Festival (1966-1977).
Fran Allison with Kukla (left) and Ollie
November 20, 1910 –‘Pauli’ Murray born, American civil and women’s rights activist, lawyer, and author. She was the first African American woman ordained as an Episcopal priest, and among the first women to be ordained by that church. Orphaned very young in Baltimore, Maryland, she was raised by her maternal grandparents in Durham, North Carolina. After being denied entry to Columbia University because it was then a males-only school, at 16, she went to Hunter College in New York, graduating with a BA in English in 1933. During the Depression, she worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps at an all-woman camp founded at the urging of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, whom she met when she visited the camp, but Murray later clashed with the camp’s director after he found a Marxist book among her belongings, and he disapproved of her relationship with Peg Holmes, a white counselor. They both left the camp in 1935, and traveled the country on foot, hitching rides and hopping freight trains, before finding employment, Murray with the YWCA. In 1940, Murray was arrested for sitting in the whites-only section of a Virginia bus, a violation of Virginia’s segregation laws. After this incident, and her involvement with the socialist Workers’ Defense League, Murray enrolled in the law school at Howard University after being denied entry to the University of North Carolina because of her race. At Howard, her awareness of sexism increased, which she called “Jane Crow” (alluding to the Jim Crow laws which enforced racial segregation in the Southern U.S.). She graduated first in her class, but was denied entry to Harvard for post-graduate work because of her gender. In 1964, she delivered her speech “Jim Crow and Jane Crow” in Washington DC. She earned a master’s degree in law at University of California, Berkeley, and in 1965 she became the first African American to receive a Doctor of Juridical Science degree from Yale Law School. As a lawyer, Murray took on civil and women’s rights cases. Thurgood Marshall, then chief counsel for the NAACP, caller her 1950 book, States’ Laws on Race and Color, Reed v. Reed, th
November 20, 1913 – Libertas Schulze-Boysen born in Paris to German parents; she joined the Nazi Party in 1933, but became disillusioned, and left the party early in 1937, using time needed for household duties and taking care of her husband as an excuse. With her husband, Harro Schulze-Boysen, she began sounding out like-minded people to form a secret resistance group. In 1940, while she was writing film reviews for Essener Zeitung Reichskriegsgericht
November 20, 1918 – Sister Mary Corita, born as Corita Kent , American Catholic nun who was a Pop Art silkscreen artist; she left the religious order in 1967, but continued her peace work with Physicians for Social Responsibility. She designed the 1985 version of the U.S. Postal Service’s ‘Love’ stamp.
November 20, 1919 – Jane Cook Wright born, American surgeon, and pioneering cancer researcher, known for her contributions to chemotherapy. She developed a technique using human tissue culture rather than laboratory mice to test the effects of potential drugs on cancer cells. She also pioneered the use of the drug methotrexate to treat breast cancer and skin cancer (mycosis fungoids). Her father was one of the first African American graduates from Harvard Medical School; her grandfather, and other members of her family including her sister Barbara, were also doctors. After graduating from Smith College, she earned a full scholarship to study medicine at New York Medical College, graduating at the top of her class in 1945 with an honors award. She interned at Bellevue Hospital (1945-1946), and completer her surgical residency at Harlem Hospital in 1948. In 1949, she joined her father in research at the Harlem Hospital Cancer Research Center, succeeding him as director when he died in 1952. She worked on developing dosage recommendations for the new drugs beings developed to treat cancer, and campaigned for chemotherapy treatment to be more widely available. She also studied the effects of several different drugs on tumors. In 1951 she and her team were the first to identify Methotrexate as an effective tool against cancerous tumors. Wright's early work brought chemotherapy out of the realm of an untested, experimental hypothetical treatment, into the realm of tested, proven effective cancer therapeutics, saving millions of lives. Her work with this form of chemotherapy proved to be the stepping stone for combination therapy as well as the individual adjustments due to patient toxicity. During her career, Cooke collaborated with cell biologist and physiologist Jewel Plummer Cobb, another noted African American woman scientist. In 1964, she was the only woman among seven physicians who helped to found the American Society of Clinical Oncology, and in 1971, she was the first woman elected president of the New York Cancer Society. She worked in Ghana in 1957 and in Kenya in 1961, treating cancer patients. She was vice president of the African Research and Medical Foundation (1973-1984). Wright retired in 1985 and was appointed emerita professor at New York Medical College in 1987.
November 20, 1923 – Nadine Gordimer born, South African author and anti-apartheid activist; 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature; member of the African National Congress during the period it was banned; her books were also banned by the white South African government; she is known for July’s People, The Conservationist, and The Pickup.
November 20, 1925 – Maya Plisetskaya born, Soviet ballet dancer, choreographer and ballet director; as a child, she was taken in by her aunt in 1938, after her father was arrested, and then executed during the Great Purge, and her mother was arrested, sent to prison, and then to a concentration camp. She studied at the Bolshoi Ballet School beginning at age 9, and first performed with the Bolshoi Ballet at age 11. At age 18, she became a member of the Bolshoi Ballet company, quickly rising to be their leading soloist. When the Soviet Union began allowing tours outside the country, she went with the Bolshoi in 1959, and later was allowed to tour as a star on her own. Her technical skill and dramatic presence set a higher standard for other dancers, and she created a number of leading roles, including Phrygia in 1958’s Spartacus. She was proclaimed the prima ballerina assoluta of the Bolshoi Theatre in 1960. In 1971, she ventured into choreography, with her ballet, Anna Karenina, followed by The Seagull and others. She was ballet director of the Rome Opera (1983-1984), and artistic director of the Ballet Teatro Linco Nacional in Madrid (1987-1990). In 1996, she was named President of the Imperial Russian Ballet, and danced the Dying Swan, her signature role, at a gala in her honor. She died in 2015.
Maya Plisetskaya as the Dying Swan
November 20, 1929 – Penelope Hobhouse born, British garden designer, author, and television presenter. She was awarded the MBE in the 2014 Queen's Birthday Honours List for her services to British Gardening. The Story of Gardening; Garden Style; and Plants in Garden History are among her many books.
November 20, 1930 – Christine Arnothy born in Budapest, was a French author, who went through the 1945 siege of Budapest, and later fled Hungary with her family. Her teenage diary was her only remaining possession when they arrived in France. She wrote J’ai quinze ans et je ne veux pas mourir (I am Fifteen and I Do Not Want to Die) It is Not So Easy to Live,
November 20, 1937 – Viktoriya Tokareva born, Russian screenwriter and short story author; noted for her books Vmesto menya (Instead of Me ), and Loshadi s kryl'yami (Horses with Wings ).
November 20, 1940 – Wendy Doniger born, American Indologist (Indian subcontinent studies), a scholar of Sanskrit and Indian textual traditions; author of Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva; Hindu Myths: A Sourcebook; The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology; Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts; The Rig Veda: An Anthology, 108 Hymns Translated from the Sanskrit.
November 20, 1940 – Helma Sanders-Brahms born, German film producer-director, screenwriter, and feminist; noted for her influential films Unter dem Pflaster ist der Strand (Under the Pavement Lies the Strand) , and Germany, Pale Mother.
November 20, 1941 – Haseena Moin born, Pakistani playwright and screenwriter; she began her career writing radio dramas for Radio Pakistan Karachi, then wrote scripts for television, including the first original television drama not based on a novel. Known for her drama serial Dhoop Kinare, which first aired in 1987. She has also written scripts for motion pictures, and is considered the nation’s best dramatist.
November 20, 1942 – Meredith Monk born, American composer, vocalist, director, filmmaker, and choreographer; her music was used in the Coen Brothers film The Big Lebowski, and the 1982 movie Plainsong.
November 20, 1945 – Deborah Eisenberg born, American short-story writer; professor of writing at Columbia University; honored with six O. Henry Awards (1986, 1995, 1997, 2002, 2006, and 2013), and the 2000 Rea Award for the Short Story; her short story collection, Twilight of the Superheroes,
November 20, 1946 – Judy Woodruff born, American television journalist; anchor of PBS News Hour since 2011 . Woodruff is a board member of the International Women’s Media Foundation, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
November 20, 1950 – Jacqueline Gourault born, French MoDem politician; Minister of Territorial Cohesion and Relationships with territorial collectivities since 2018; Member of the Senate of France for Loir-et-Cher (2001-2017); Mayor of La Chaussée-Saint-Victor (1989-2014).
November 20, 1959 – Diane M. James born, British Independence Party politician; Member of the European Parliament for South East England since 2014; Leader of the UK Independence Party (2016); Deputy Co-Chair of the UK Independence Party (2016), and UK Independence Party spokesperson for the Home Affairs, and Justice (2014-2016).
November 20, 1966 – Jill Thompson born, American comic book writer-illustrator; noted for work on Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, and her own Scary Godmother series.
November 20, 1968 – Robin Canup born, American astrophysicist, notable for her research on the giant impact hypothesis, and origins and planets; awarded the 2003 Harold C. Urey Prize.
November 20, 1976 – Dominique Dawes born; she was part of the Magnificent Seven U.S. Women’s Olympic Gymnastics team in 1996 at Atlanta, where she became the first African-American to win a gold medal in gymnastics. Dawes was honored with the 2003 "Caring Hands, Caring Hearts" Award by Ronald McDonald House Charities. She was President of the Women's Sports Federation (2004–2006), and was a commentator for the Beijing Olympics in 2008. In 2010, President Obama appointed Dawes as co-chair of the newly renamed President's Council on Fitness, Sports and Nutrition.
November 20, 1999 – Gwendolyn Ann Smith promotes the first Transgender Day of Remembrance, to honor the memory of Rita Hester, a transgender woman killed in 1998 – vigils and other events are now promoted by GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation).
November 20, 1999 – The Republican-controlled U.S. Senate confirmed Trump’s latest judicial appointee, Barbara Lagoa , to the 11th U.S. Circuit of Appeals in Atlanta. Lagoa was appointed to Florida’s Third District Court of Appeals by Jeb Bush, then was promoted to Chief Judge of the Third District - but only served for eight days in January 2019 before she was appointed a Justice of the Supreme Court of Florida, serving there for less than a year. The 80-15 vote gave the 11th circuit its 5th Trump appointee, and a 7-5 majority of right-wing judges. In 2017, only four of the 13 federal appeals courts had Republican-appointed majorities. In 2020, seven out of the 13 appeals courts have right-wing majorities. Lagoa was rumored to be one of the candidates under consideration by Trump for Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Trump’s appointees to Federal benches
November 20, 1999 – Susan Choi’s novel Trust Exercise , about students at a performing arts high school, won the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction , and Sarah M. Bloom won the Nonfiction Award for her memoir The Yellow House,
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