WOW2: Early October's Women Trailblazers and Events in Our History - 2019

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WOW2: Early October's Women Trailblazers and Events in Our History - 2019

by officebss for This Week in the War on Women

Community

(This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday, Oct. 12, 2019 Saturday, Oct. 12, 2019 at 3:29:06pm PDT

Welcome to WOW2!

WOW2 is a sister blog to This Week in the War on Women. This edition covers women and events just from October 1 to October 11.

Since I’ve broken the data limit on individual diaries, I’m now splitting WOW2 into three posts. On Saturday, October 19, Mid-October will post, followed by Late October on Saturday, October 26.

This is an on-going, evolving project. So many women have been added to the lists since its beginning in 2015 that even changing the posts from monthly to twice a month, the pages kept getting longer and more unwieldy – an astonishing and wonderful problem to have!

The purpose of WOW2 is to learn about and honor women of achievement, including many who’ve been ignored or marginalized in most of the history books, and to mark moments in women’s history. It also serves as a reference archive of women’s history. There are so many more phenomenal women than I ever dreamed of finding, and all too often their stories are almost unknown, even to feminists and scholars.

Many thanks to libera nos — not only for volunteering to be the proofreader for WOW2, but for also contributing to the research. So he is now officially Assistant Editor of WOW2. Any remaining mistakes are either mine, or uncaught computer glitches in transferring the data from his emails to DK5.

And I thanks to wow2lib, who happens to be married to libera nos, and has used her considerable library science skills to seek out new sources of information, and add more names to WOW 2’s ever-expanding pantheon of Women of Achievement. She will be an occasional contributor, and is WOW2’s Librarian Emeritus.

For the entire previous EARLY OCTOBER list as of 2018,

click HERE: www.dailykos.com/...

Otherwise, what you’re seeing on this Early October 2019 page are the
new people and events, or additional information and visuals,
found since last year.

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

This Week in the War on Women

will post soon, so be sure to go there next to catch
up on the latest dispatches from the frontlines.

Early October’s Women Trailblazers and Events in Our History

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

_________________________________

October 1, 1526 – Dorothy Stafford born, Lady Stafford, who married her distant cousin Sir Henry Stafford. A staunch Protestant, she and her family went into exile in Switzerland during the reign of Mary I, but she returned to England with her children in 1559, after the coronation of Elizabeth I. She was appointed as Mistress of the Robes to Queen Elizabeth, holding the office until Elizabeth’s death in 1603, becoming the queen’s trusted confidant, and having considerable influence with her. Her son Edward became the English Ambassador to France in 1578, largely due to her influence. Noted as a “continual Remembrancer of the Suits of the Poor” on her funeral monument.

October 1, 1847 – Maria Mitchell becomes the second woman to discover a comet, after Caroline Herschel, winning a prize established by King Frederick VI of Denmark. She was later appointed as head of the Vassar College Observatory (1865-1888), making her the first professional woman astronomer in the U.S., but she had to persuade the administration to allow her students to be outside at night for observing. When she discovered her pay was less than younger male professors at Vassar, she insisted on and got a salary increase.

October 1, 1847 – Annie Besant born, British socialist, women’s rights activist, theosophist, author and orator. She was a notable speaker for the Fabian Society, the National Secular Society (NSS) and later for the Theosophist Society. She was prosecuted for publishing a book advocating birth control in 1877, but the case was thrown out on a technicality. However, her estranged husband used the case to gain sole custody of their children, claiming she was an unfit mother. She supported labor movement actions, including the 1887 Bloody Sunday march which became a clash between protesters and police – she organized legal aid for the jailed workers and raised funds to support their families - and helped organize the successful 1888 London matchgirls strike. She was elected to the London School Board for Tower Hamlets in 1888, even though only a few women could vote in some local elections at the time. Besant also supported home-rule for Ireland and India, and became a member of the Indian National Congress. In 1902, she wrote, "India is not ruled for the prospering of the people, but rather for the profit of her conquerors, and her sons are being treated as a conquered race." Even while she supported Home Rule, she attacked the caste system and child marriage, and was a strong advocate for expanding educational opportunities in India. In 1916, she was in India and became co-founder of the All India Home Rule League, holding public meetings, and mobilizing demonstrations, which led to her being arrested 1917 and interned at a hill station. The Indian National Congress and the Muslim League joined forces and threatened mass protests if she were not set free. The British government was forced to give way and to make vague but significant concessions. It was announced that the ultimate aim of British rule was Indian self-government, and moves in that direction were promised. Besant was freed in September 1917, welcomed by crowds all over India. In December, she took over as president of the Indian National Congress for a year. Both Nehru and Gandhi spoke of Besant’s influence with admiration.

October 1, 1861 – Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management is published, selling 60,000 copies in its first year and remaining in print in revised editions to the present day.

October 1, 1862 – Esther Boise Van Deman born, a leading American archaeologist; first woman to specialize in Roman field archaeology, establishing the standards for dating ancient constructions using variations in building materials, which advanced the study of Roman architecture; author of The Building of the Roman Aqueducts and The Atrium Vestae.

**Esther Boise Van Deman** at Villa Borghese

October 1, 1891 – Stanford University opens its doors as a coeducational, tuition-free (until 1920) institution near Palo Alto California.

October 1, 1893 – Faith Baldwin born, author of over 85 popular novels, frequently using women juggling career and family as a central theme; her last book, Adam’s Eden, was published in 1977, the year before she died at age 84.

FaithBaldwin-quoteTimedressmakerspecializinginalterations.jpg

October 1, 1912 – Kathleen Ollerenshaw born, English mathematician and politician, known for her work on lattices and pandiagonal magic squares. She was President of the Institute of Mathematics and Its Applications (1978-1979). Ollerenshaw had a successful political career in spite of being deaf since the age of eight and only receiving an effective hearing aid at age 37. She was Lord Mayor of Manchester (1975-1976), and High Sheriff of Greater Manchester (1978-1979), while serving as Councilor for Rushholme (1956-1981). She was an amateur astronomer who donated her telescope to Lancaster University, where an observatory is named for her.

October 1, 1921 – Margaret Hillis born, conductor, founder/director of Grammy-winning Chicago Symphony Chorus, which she conducted for 37 years; The Margaret Hillis Award for Choral Excellence is now given annually.

October 1, 1924 – Leonie Gibson Kramer born, Dame Leonie Kramer, Australian academic; in 1968, she became the first woman full professor of English in Australia. She was also the first woman to chair the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (1982-1983), and the first woman chancellor of the University of Sydney (1991-2001); Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (1982) and a Companion of the Order of Australia (1993).

October 1, 1931 – Spanish women win the right to vote.

October 1, 1935 – Dame Julie Andrews born, actress, and singer noted for her four-octave vocal range. She won an Academy Award for Best Actress for Mary Poppins. She is also a theatre director, children’s book author, and was an advocate and fundraiser for Operation USA during the Haitian relief campaign after the devastating 2010 earthquake. Andrews has continued her career as an actress after botched surgery for nodules in 1997 damaged her vocal cords, limiting her range and ability to hold notes.

October 1, 1938 – Stella Stevens born, American actress, director and producer in film and television; noted for producing and directing the documentary The American Heroine, and directing the comedy movie The Ranch.

October 1, 1940 – Phyllis Chesler born, American writer, psychotherapist, and feminist; noted for her best-selling seminal book, Women and Madness; her other work covers gender issues, mental illness, divorce and child custody, surrogacy, second-wave feminism, pornography, prostitution, incest, violence against women, and honor killings; she is the co-founder of the International Committee for Women of the Wall, which promotes the religious rights of Jewish Women in Jerusalem.

October 1, 1949 – Sheila Gilmore born, Scottish, British Labour Party politician; Member of Parliament for Edinburgh East (2010-2015); Edinburgh District Council member (1991-2007), appointed Convenor of Housing (1999).

October 1, 1950 – Susan Greenfield born, Baroness Greenfield of Ot Moor, British scientist, author, broadcaster, Life Peer and member of the House of Lords since 2001; noted for work on treatments for Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease; also interested in the neuroscience of consciousness and the impact of technology on the brain; senior research fellow at Lincoln College, Oxford; chancellor of Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh (2005-2013). She was the director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain (1998-2010).

October 1, 1953 – Grete Waitz born, Norwegian marathon runner, won the New York City Marathon nine times, more than any other runner.

October 1, 1957 – Éva Tardos born, Hungarian mathematician; Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University, and Associate Dean of the College of Computing and Information Science; Chair of the Cornell Department of Computer Science (2006-2010). Noted for research on algorithms, focusing on the design and analysis of efficient methods for combinatorial optimization problems on graphs or networks, and has also worked on network flow algorithms like approximation algorithms for network flows, cut, and clustering problems. Her recent work focuses on algorithmic game theory. Elected to the National Academy of Engineering (2007), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences (2013). Winner of the Fulkerson Prize (1988), the George B. Dantzig Prize (2006), the Van Wijngaarden Award (2011), the Gödel Prize (2012), the EATCS Award (2017), and the IEEE John von Neumann Medal (2019).

October 1, 1977 – Christel Takigawa born in Paris, Japanese television announcer and news presenter for Kyodo Television; FNN News Japan newscaster (2002-2009).

October 1, 1991 – Abby Chava Stein born, American transgender author and activist. She is the first openly transgender woman raised in a Hasidic community. Noted for her book, Becoming Eve: My Journey From Ultra Orthodox Rabbi To Transgender Woman.

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October 2, 1470 – Isabella of Naples born, ‘unique in misfortune’ – Duchess consort of Milan (1489-1494) and Duchess of Bari (1500-1524). In 1489, she married her cousin, Gian Galeazzo Sforza, Duke of Milan, when she was 18 and he was 19, after being betrothed since she was 9 years old. Unfortunately, Gian’s uncle, Ludivico Sforza, was regent during his nephew’s minority, but never relinquished his power, and denied not only Gian his birthright, but also Isabella and Gian’s son, Francesco. He treated his own son, Massimiliano, as the heir, keeping Isabella and Gian virtual prisoners. Wars between the Italian city-states and the French, with intervention by the Swiss, and later invasion by the Spanish, further complicated matters. Gian Galeazzo Sforza died in captivity, in 1494, at age 25. Isabella had appealed to the French King, Charles VIII, to have mercy on her father, Alfonso II, Duke of Naples, but Charles ousted him, and much of the rest of the Italian aristocracy, during the Italian Wars (on-again, off-again from 1494 to 1559). When Gian died, Ludovico usurped the title, displacing Isabella's son. Ludovico allowed Isabella to live in the ducal apartment, but she had lost the father of her children, her Neapolitan family support had been destroyed by the French, and her son had been denied his birthright. In 1499, Ludovico was toppled from power by Louis XII of France, and Isabella petitioned Louis to name her son the Duke of Bari, one of the titles which belonged to the Milanese family. Louis responded by taking her 8-year-old son to France, assuring Isabella that he planned to marry him to his daughter, but instead, he put Francesco in a monastery. Isabella petitioned Emperor Maximilian to liberate her son from France, but this effort proved fruitless. She never saw her son again. He died in France, after falling from a horse, in 1512. Fearing for her own safety, she left Milan for Naples, taking her two daughters with her, but it was no safer there, where her uncle was the nominal head after her brother Frederick died childless in 1496. Frederick’s death made Isabella the heir to his claim as King of Jerusalem, but that too was taken by Louis XII. She was granted the title of suo jure (in her own right) Duchess of Bari, which Louis had denied her son. She ruled in Bari (a city on the Adriatic Sea in southern Italy), enlarging the castle, enhancing its defenses, and keeping a sharp eye on public officials, which limited their notorious corruption, and prevented them from plotting against her. She also formed a court which became a center of the arts and literature. Her daughter Ippolita died at the age of eight, and Isabella dedicated herself to her sole surviving child, Bona, who was given an advanced education, including lessons in statecraft. Bona was married in 1517 to Sigismund, King of Poland, who was almost twice her age. She inherited the title of Duchess of Bari when her mother died at age 53 in 1524. The widowed Queen Bona of Poland returned to Bari in 1557, only to be poisoned by a trusted officer, most likely acting for King Philip II of Spain, who owed a sizeable debt to Bona.

ProbablepaintingIsabellaofNaplesDuchessofMilanbyGiovanniAntonioBoltraffio.jpg

October 2, 1718 – Elizabeth Montagu born, English reformer, “Queen of the Blues” (Bluestockings, literary intellectuals) who was celebrated for her literary salon which included Samuel Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, Elizabeth Carter, David Garrick, Fanny Burney, and Sarah Fielding and Horace Walpole. She was also a patron of the arts, up-and-coming writers in particular. In 1760, she wrote and contributed anonymously three sections to Dialogues of the Dead, and in 1769, published under her name An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear. When her much older husband died in 1775, she inherited his substantial fortune, and the following year, adopted her orphaned nephew Matthew Robinson, making him her heir. She devoted much of her wealth to fostering British literature and relief for the poor, especially the workers in the Newcastle coal mines which were an important source of the Montagu fortune. A collection of her letters was published posthumously, many of them written to her sister, Sarah Scott, who was novelist and translator.

Elizabeth Montagu (1762) by Allan Ramsay

October 2, 1755 – Hannah Adams born, acquired a fair knowledge of Greek and Latin from divinity students boarding with her father, then tutored others to earn a living when her father went bankrupt. She turned to writing for additional income, and became the first U.S. woman to earn a living as an author, mainly writing about religion and history, including An Alphabetical Compendium of the Various Sects (1784), an encyclopedic outline of world religions, and A Summary History of New England (1799), which caused some scandal as she squared off with Reverend Jedidiah Morse, an orthodox Calvinist, over publication rights for their competing history textbooks, which eventually ruined Morse's reputation, as Adams's coterie of liberal Bostonians rallied to her defense.

October 2, 1846 – Eliza Maria Mosher born, physician and educator, held positions as a prison physician, prison superintendent, college physician, college professor and women's dean at the University of Michigan (1896-1902); founder of the American Posture League, re-designing chairs for streetcars and kindergarten classrooms, and lecturing on the health benefits of physical education.

October 2,1871 – Martha Brookes Hutcheson born, American landscape architect; enrolled in first course offered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Landscape Architecture, but had to leave after two years of study; designed the grounds for a number of residential estates, including the garden at Alice Mary Longfellow’s Cambridge MA home; after marriage, she retired from commercial practice, but landscaped her five acre garden at their 100 acre farm, now a New Jersey Historic Trust property, the Bamboo Brook Education Center; third woman named a fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects; author of The Spirit of the Garden (1923).

October 2, 1885 – Ruth Bryan Owen born, first southern woman representative in U.S. Congress, (Democrat-Florida, 1929-1933); first woman on House Foreign Affairs Committee, and the first woman appointed as a U.S. Ambassador (1933-1936, to Denmark).

congresswoman-ruth-bryan-owen-in-her-office-april-13-1929.jpg — Congresswoman Ruth Bryan Owen in 1929

October 2, 1889 – Margaret Chung born in the U.S. to Chinese immigrant parents, the oldest of 11 children. She won a Los Angeles Times scholarship by selling newspaper subscriptions, then worked to pay the rest of her expenses by waiting tables and winning speech contests. Chung was the first Chinese heritage woman medical student at the University of Southern California Medical School, graduating in 1916. Then she completed her internship and residency in Illinois, becoming the first known American woman physician of Chinese descent. She started her practice in San Francisco in 1922, then founded one of the first Western medical clinics in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Some of her patients came from outside Chinatown, including U.S. Navy reserve pilots, and other naval officers, whom she not only treated, but also fed, becoming their “Mom Chung.” She gave them jade Buddhas to wear around their necks, and during WWII, pilots wearing them would recognize each other as “Mom Chung’s adopted sons.” When Japan invaded China in 1937, Chung volunteered as a front-line surgeon, but was also secretly assigned to recruit pilots for the American volunteers, known as the “Flying Tigers.” During WWII, she held Thanksgiving gatherings for up to 175 people at her home, and addressed thousands of Christmas gifts. Her houseguests included high ranking officers, U.S. senators and congressmen; leaning on these connections, she helped establish the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, although she was not permitted to join them, because the FBI suspected that she was a lesbian. Mom Chung adopted the entire VF-2 squadron, nicknamed "The Rippers" for their logo, which showed a Chinese dragon ripping a flag. When she retired from practice in the mid-1950s, her “adopted sons” bought a house for her in Marin County, north of San Francisco. She died of cancer in 1959, and Admiral Chester W. Nimitz was one of her pallbearers.

October 2, 1895 – Ruth Cheney Streeter born, first director of the United States Marine Corps Women’s Reserve, and first woman to become a major in the USMC.In 1942, at the age of 47, she earned a commercial pilot’s license, hoping to serve in the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPS) as a ferry pilot, but the WASPS rejected her five times because of her age. In 1943, she was commissioned as a major and appointed director of the United States Marine Corps Women's Reserve. Streeter was in office on the official creation date of MCWR on February 13, 1943, and it grew to a total of 831 officers and 17,714 enlisted before she retired in 1945 as a lieutenant colonel. Om 1946, she was awarded the Legion of Merit, for “. . . distinctive service in directing the planning and organization of the Women's Reserve of the Marine Corps and skillfully integrating women into the basic structure of the Corps . . .”

October 2, 1912 – Alice Bourneuf born, economist, contributed to the Marshall Plan for Post-WWII European recovery; taught economics at Boston College (1959-1977).

October 2, 1919 – Shirley Clarke born, filmmaker; won an Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary, Robert Frost: A Lover’s Quarrel with the World.

October 2, 1926 – Jan Morris born James Humphrey Morris, Welsh historian author and travel writer; known particularly for the Pax Britannica trilogy (1968–1978), a history of the British Empire, and for portraits of cities, notably Oxford, Venice, Hong Kong, and New York City. London Times correspondent with the British Mount Everest Expedition who broke the story when Edmond Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first climbers to reach the summit; Morris began medical transition in 1964, then travelled to Morroco in 1972 to undergo sex reassignment surgery, because doctors in Britain refused to allow the procedure unless Morris and his wife divorced, something Morris was not prepared to do at the time. She published under her birth name until after her surgery in 1972.

October 2, 1929 – Tanaquil La Clercq born, principal dancer with the New York City Ballet until she contracted polio while on tour in Copenhagen in 1956, which paralyzed her from the waist down; she later taught ballet and wrote Mourka: The Autobiography of a Cat, and The Ballet Cook Book.

October 2, 1941 – Diana Hendry born, English poet, children’s author and short story writer; won the 1991 Whitbread Award for best children’s book for Harvey Angell.

October 2, 1943 – Anna Ford born, English journalist and television news reader who worked for for Granada TV (1974-1977), ITN (1978-1981) and the BBC (1977-1978 and 1986-2006); she helped launch TV-am, the first British breakfast television programme (1981).

October 2, 1949 – Annie Leibovitz born, portrait photographer; first woman to hold an exhibition at Washington’s National Portrait Gallery (1991).

October 2, 1955 – Nancy Rothwell born, British physiologist, President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Manchester since 2010; one of the directors of AstraZeneca, the pharamaceuticals company; co-chair of the Council for Science and Technology; noted for research on Brown adipose tissue and Cytokines; Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire since 2005.

October 2, 1968 – Victoria Derbyshire born, English journalist and broadcaster; her current affairs and debate programme has been on BBC Two and the BBC News Channel since 2015.

October 2, 1973 – Melissa Harris-Perry born, American writer, academic, and political commentator with a focus on African-American politics; host of the Melissa Harris-Perry show on MSNBC (2012-2016); she taught political science at the University of Chicago (1999-2006); Associate Professor of political science and African-American studies at Princeton (2006-2011), leaving when she was denied a full professorship; Founding Director of the Anna Julia Cooper Project, a center for study of Southern race, gender and politics, at Tulane University (2011-2014); regular columnist for The Nation magazine; author of Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America.

October 2, 1973 – Maria Wetterstrand born, Swedish Green Party politician and Spokesperson (2002-2011) with Peter Eriksson, Member of the Riksdag (Sweden’s parliament, 2001-2011).

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October 3, 1373? – (date uncertain) Jadwiga of Poland born, the first woman monarch of the Kingdom of Poland. She reigned from 1384 to 1399.

October 3, 1648 – Élisabeth Sophie Chéron born, French painter, poet, musician and academicienne.

1670sElisabethSophieCheronFrenchartist1648-1711SelfPortrait.jpg — Self Portrait — by Elisabeth Sophie Cheron

October 3,1849 – Jeannette L. Gilder born, pioneering American woman journalist; using the pen name “Brunswick,” she wrote for The Boston Evening Transcript and was their New York Correspondent; co-founder with her brother Richard of The Critic (1881-1906), a literary magazine; also joint editor with him of Scribner’s Monthly.

October 3,1858 – Eleonora Duse born into a theatrical troupe, Italian actress, regarded as one of the greatest actors of all time; remembered for roles in plays by Gabriele d’Annunzio and Henrik Ibsen; formed her own company as actor-manager – chief rival of Sarah Bernhardt. She was known for her generous help to many young performers in advancing their careers. First Lady Frances Cleveland shocked Washington society by giving in Duse’s honor the first-ever White House tea held for an actress in 1896. Duse retired from acting in 1909, suffering from respiratory problems, but returned to the stage in 1921 for a series of engagements in Europe and America. She was the first woman to be featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1923. She died in 1924 of pneumonia at age 65, and her body was returned to Italy, where she was buried in Asolo.

October 3, 1859 – Lilian Whiting born, journalist and author, The Life Radiant, Land of Enchantment, and The Golden Road among many others.

October 3, 1860 – Annie Horniman born, British theatre manager, co-founder of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, and the Gaiety Theatre in Manchester, promoted new playwrights.

The original Abbey Theatre on left, and
*Annie Horniman, portrait* by Emma Magnus

October 3, 1873 – Emily Post born, American author and authority on etiquette; Etiquette, her first major book, was successful because it broke new ground, aimed at people who were without wealth or social position, telling her readers that making others feel comfortable was more important than knowing which fork to use; her radio program and daily column were so popular, she had to set up a special office to handle the high volume of mail.

October 3, 1885 – Sophie Treadwell born, American playwright, novelist and journalist; Machinal is the best-known of her plays that were performed on Broadway.

October 3, 1896 – Auvergne Doherty born, Australian who was the first Western Australian woman, and one of the first nine women, to be called to the English bar. Doherty passed the Responsions exams for Oxford University in 1916, then graduated and matriculated in October 1920. Auvergne was called to the Bar in England in 1922, following the enactment of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act. Although she gained admission to Middle Temple, she returned to Australia in 1930, then took over the family cattle business when her father died in 1935. She resigned as director in 1946, and died in 1961 at age 64.

October 3, 1897 – Ruth Muskrat Bronson born; she was the first Guidance and Placement Officer (1931-1943) of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, helping Indian students get loans and scholarships, and to find jobs after graduation. As executive secretary of the National Congress of American Indians, she helped force authorities to honor treaties. After her work for the BIA in Washington DC, she became a health education specialist for the Indian Health Service. She wrote books and articles, including, Indians are People Too; The Church in Indian Life; and Shall We Repeat Indian History in Alaska?

October 3, 1898 - Gertrude Edelstein Berg born as Tillie Edelstein, American pioneer in radio, who wrote, produced and starred in the long-running serial comedy-drama The Rise of the Goldbergs, later called The Goldbergs, about the Jewish family of Molly and Jake Goldberg who live in a Bronx tenement. The first 15-minute episode aired on November 20, 1929 on the NBC radio network. She wrote almost all 5,000 of the show’s radio episodes, and a 1948 Broadway adaptation, Me and Molly. In 1949, CBS put The Goldbergs on television. Gertrude Berg won the very first Emmy Award for Lead Actress in a Comedy Series for the show’s debut season. In 1951, her co-star Philip Loeb, who played Jake Goldberg, was blacklisted when his name appeared in Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television. The series was canceled as a result of Loeb’s participation, and both networks and sponsors insisted Loeb be fired as a condition of the show returning to air, despite Gertrude Berg’s protests. Loeb resigned rather than cause Berg trouble. He reportedly received a generous severance package from the show, but he sank into a depression that ultimately drove him to suicide in 1955. The Goldbergs returned a year after Loeb departed the show and continued until 1954, after which Berg also wrote and produced a syndicated film version.

October 3, 1904 – Mary McLeod Bethune opens her first school for African-American students in Daytona Beach, Florida.

October 3, 1906 – Natalie Savage Carlson born, American children’s book author; she wove family stories and folktales from her French Canadian heritage into her early books, such as The Talking Cat and Other Stories of French Canada. Noted for The Family Under the Bridge, and The Orphelines books.

October 3, 1922 – Governor Hardwick of Georgia appoints Rebecca Felton fill a vacancy in the U.S. Senate, the first woman to be a U.S. Senator. She served just 24 hours. At 87 years, nine months, and 22 days old, she was the oldest freshman senator to enter the Senate. Felton is still the only woman to have ever served as a U.S. Senator from Georgia. Felton was also the last person to serve in either house who had been a slave owner before the Civil War, and was an outspoken white supremacist and racist. She died in 1930.

October 3, 1940 – Laurie Simmons born, American artist, photographer and filmmaker; part of The Pictures Generation, a group of artists whose work was shown in a 2009 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art; notable for her Black Series, photographs of rooms she constructed with dollhouse furniture and replicas of iconic, easily recognizable artworks, and her 2006 film, The Music of Regret.

October 3, 1951 – Kathryn D. Sullivan born, American geologist, oceanographer and NASA astronaut; a crew member on three Space Shuttle missions, she became the first American woman to walk in space on October 11, 1984. Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans, and Atmosphere Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (2014-2017).

October 3, 1955 – Buket Uzuner born, Turkish best-selling novelist, and travelogue and short story writer; noted for her travelogues about being a solo woman backpacker, including Travel Notes of An Urban Romantic, and her 2013 novel İstanbullular (English title is I Am Istanbul). Her first novel, İki Yeşil Susamuru, Anneleri, Babaları, Sevgilileri ve Diğerleri (translated as Two Green Otters, Mothers, Fathers, Lovers and All the Others) was published in 1991. Uziner was awarded Turkey’s Yunus Nadi prize for her novel Balık İzlerinin Sesi (translated as The Sound of Fishsteps).

October 3, 1958 – Chen Yanyin born, Chinese sculptor; her first solo show, Box Series, was at the Shanghai Oil Painting and Sculpture Institute in 1994; she participated in several collaborative shows around the world, and some of her work was shown in Between Ego and Society: An Exhibition of Contemporary Female Artists in China at the Chicago Cultural Center.

October 3, 1958 – Louise Lecavalier born, Canadian contemporary dance icon; began her professional career as a member of Le Groupe Nouvelle Aire; joined Édouard Lock’s dance group, Lock Danseurs, in 1980, which quickly became La La La Human Steps, where she was the company’s principal dancer; her first work as a choreographer was So Blue, which premiered in Düsseldorf in 2012. Lecavalier was honored with the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement in dance in 2014.

October 3, 1961 – Rebecca Stephens born, British mountaineer, writer, motivational speaker, leadership coach, and journalist. She was the first British woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest, the third woman and the first British Woman to climb the Seven Summits. She is the founder of the leadership development company Seven Summits Performance Ltd. Stevens was a presenter on the BBC television science series Tomorrow’s World (1994-1996).

October 3, 1969 – Gwen Stefani born, American singer-songwriter, actress and record producer. She is the winner of three Grammy Awards. Stefani donated $1 million to Save the Children’s Japan Earthquake-Tsunami Children in Emergency Fund after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, has auctioned off clothing for several charities, and hosted a fundraiser with First Lady Michelle Obama in 2012. She is a supporter of American Foundation for AIDS Research, Artists for Peace and Justice, Baby2Baby, Feeding America, and UNICEF.

October 3,1971 – Billie Jean King becomes first woman athlete to earn $100,000 in a single season

October 3,1980 – Lindsey Kelk born, British author of thirteen novels, journalist and blogger, currently lives in Los Angeles, California; former children’s book editor; noted for her “I heart” books, which began with I (heart symbol) New York.

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October 4, 1625 – Jacqueline Pascal born, French nun and composer; sister of the polymath Blaise Pascal. The youngest child of three, Jacqueline Pascal became the caregiver for her father during his last years. She struck an agreement with him: she would take care of him until his death and would then enter the convent. At his death, however, her sickly brother Blaise insisted that Jacqueline remain home as his caregiver. In a letter to Blaise, Jacqueline refused to be trapped in the domestic role and insisted on the right to follow her own vocation. “It’s no longer reasonable to continue my deference to other’s feelings over my own. It’s their turn to do some violence to their own feelings in return for the violence I did to my own inclinations during four years. It is from you, in particular, that I expect this token of affection.”

October 4, 1835 – Jenny Twitchell Kempton born, American contralto opera soloist whose career spanned almost five decades; Kempton was a supporter of women’s suffrage who gave numerous benefit concerts for the cause between 1890 and 1910.

October 4, 1836 – Juliette Lambert Adam born, French author and feminist, Les provinciaux à Paris, Laide, Grecque, and L'Angleterre en Egypte; member of the Avant-Courrière (Forerunner) association, which campaigned for the right of women to have control over the product of their labor and to be witnesses.

October 4, 1864 – Eliza Kellas born, American educator; principal (1911-1916) of the Emma Willard School, the first U.S. women’s higher education institution (founded in 1814 as the Troy Female Seminary); co-founder of Russell Sage College, originally part of the Emma Willard School, which mainly through the efforts of Kellas, secured a separate charter in 1917, stressing science education for women.

October 4, 1876 – Florence Eliza Allen born, American mathematician and suffrage activist; second woman to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she became an instructor and assistant professor; published papers on transcendental curves and the rational plane cubic.

October 4, 1888 – Lucy Tayiah Eads born, aka Cha-me, first woman tribal chief of the Kaw tribe (1922-1928) and nurse at the Haskell Indian College; mother of nine children.

October 4, 1896 – Dorothy Lawrence born, English reporter; disguised as a man, she posed as a soldier at the front during WWI for ten days before turning herself in and being interrogated as a suspected spy; after the war, her book, Dorothy Lawrence: The Only English Woman Soldier, was heavily censored by the British War Office.

October 4, 1906 – Sister Mary Celine Fasenmyer born, American mathematician and a sister of the Sisters of Mercy, a Catholic women religious congregation, known for her work on recurrence relations in hypergeometric series,.and linear algebra. The hypergeometric polynomials she studied are called Sister Celine's polynomials.

October 4, 1906 – Alice Stewart born, English epidemiologist, who demonstrated the connection between foetal X-rays and childhood leukemia. Her research proved there was a greater danger from exposure to low-level radiation, but this was resisted by officials of the British and U.S. governments. Starting in WW II, she investigated the health effects of exposure to TNT in munitions factories, of carbon tetrachloride, and a prevalence of tuberculosis among shoe industry workers. After a visit to the U.S. in 1974, Stewart consulted on a major investigation of the health of workers in the nuclear industry there.

October 4, 1908 – Eleanor Flexner born, author, pioneer in the field of Women’s Studies and historian – Century of Struggle: The Women’s Rights Movement in the United States, and Mary Wollstonecraft: A Biography.

October 4, 1917 – Violeta Parra born, Chilean singer-songwriter, folklorist, ethnomusicologist and visual artist.

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October 4, 1932 – Ann Thwaite born, British biographer; AA Milne: His Life is the Whitbread Biography of the Year for 1990.

October 4, 1941 – Ann Rice born, American author; Interview with the Vampire is the first book in her series The Vampire Chronicles

October 4, 1941 – Karen Cushman born, American author of historical fiction; her children’s books, The Midwife’s Apprentice won the 1996 Newbery Medal, and Catherine, Called Birdy was 1995 Newbery Honor Book.

October 4, 1942 – Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir born, Icelandic Social Democratic Alliance politician; Prime Minister of Iceland (2009-2013); Minister of Social Affairs and Social Security (2007-2009); during her tenure as PM, the country was in the midst of an economic crisis caused by the default of Iceland’s major privately owned commercial banks, the worst banking collapse in the nation’s history. Iceland’s gross domestic product fell by 10% between 2007 and 2010. But by 2011, a new era with positive GDP emerged, the unemployment rate declined, and the government deficit went from 9.7% in 2009-2010 to .02% in 2014. The failed banks were restructured, divided into old and new state-owned banks, which were recapitalized by the Icelandic government, and the Icelandic Constitution was put under review by a Constitutional Council, which included 25 non-political members of the public elected by the people. In 2010, Iceland became the first Western democratic country to ban strip clubs, paying for nudity in restaurants, and other means of employers profiting from employees' nudity. Sigurðardóttir said, "The Nordic countries are leading the way on women's equality, recognizing women as equal citizens rather than commodities for sale."

October 4, 1952 – Zinha Vaz, born as Francisca Maria Monteira e Silva Vaz Turpin, women’s rights activist in Guinea-Bissau, a founding member of the Resistance of Guinea-Bissau-Bafatá Movement and a Plataforma Unida and Guinean Patriotic Union politician; served as her country’s Ambassador to Gambia (2012); member of the National People’s Assembly (1994-1999 and 2000-2003); Mayor of Bissau (1999); founder and president of the Women's Association of Economic Activity of Guinea-Bissau (1992-2002). After Guinea-Bissau became independent from Portugal in 1974, she was an outspoken critic of the one-party system which was put in place. She was arrested and imprisoned (1977-1980).

October 4, 1956 – Lesley Glaister born, British novelist, poet and playwright; noted for her novels, Honour Thy Father, which won a 1991 Somerset Maughan Award; Now You See Me; and Little Egypt; and her play, Bird Calls. Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

October 4, 1976 – Barbara Walters debuts as the first woman evening news co-anchor (ABC News).

Barbara Walters, with Harry Reasoner - ABC Evening News-1976

October 4, 1980 – Sarah Fisher born, American race car driver; competed in IRL IndyCar Series (1999-2010), as well as several times in the Indy 500, and raced in the NASCAR West Series (2004-2005). Placed second in the 2001 Infiniti Grand Prix of Miami.

October 4, 1993 – Ruth Bader Ginsburg becomes the 2nd woman U.S. Supreme Court Justice.

October 4, 2010 – The U.S. Supreme Court begins a new era, with three women serving on the court for the first time, as Elena Kagan takes her place on the bench.

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October 4, 2016 – The Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled that a state bill imposing new requirements on abortion providers is unconstitutional. The legislation, Senate Bill 642, was passed in 2015 but had not taken effect due to the court challenge. The bill would have made it a felony to help a minor get an abortion without parental consent. It also would have authorized the state Bureau of Investigation to create new protocols for statutory rape cases, and would have required abortion providers to preserve fetal tissue from abortions on girls under age 14. The Oklahoma Supreme Court said the bill violated the state constitution and placed "undue burdens on access to abortion under the guise of protecting the health of women."

Oklahoma Pro-Choice supporters waiting for ruling

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October 5, 1789 – The Women’s March on Versailles: Parisiennes, mostly market women, protesting the scarcity and high cost of flour, march to Versailles to demand bread from Louis XVI, to insist the King and his court move back to Paris, and also protest his refusal to issue decrees to abolish feudalism.

October 5, 1817 – Catherine Cooper Hopley born, British author, artist, governess, and naturalist; known for her books on the American Civil War, and nature books for a general audience. She traveled in the US. (1855-1862) in Ohio, Indiana and Virginia, where she spent two years, and was suspected of being a spy for the North because of her correspondence with the London press and habit of making frequent sketches of all she observed. Unable to cross the Union blockade, she was forced to travel further South, and became a tutor to the children of Florida governor John Milton. She left Florida in 1863, and returned to England, where she published her two-volume Life in the South, and a biography of Stonewall Jackson, whom she had met during her time in Virginia. Her third book, Rambles and Adventures in the Wilds of the West, published in 1872, contained her observations on American birds, plants and insects. She became increasingly interested in reptiles and amphibians, and worked in the Gardens of the London Zoological Society. Her 1882 book, Snakes: Curiosities and Wonders of Serpent Life, was the first popular book on snakes in English. Her detailed observations on the feeding habits of snakes included a description of the mechanism by which Xenodon snakes erect their teeth in a viper-like fashion, an observation that predates those by E. G. Boulenger (generally credited with the description) by over 30 years.

October 5, 1850 – Fanny Jane Butler born, pioneering English medical missionary to India, worked in Kashmir, also founded medical facilities in Srinagar and Bhagalpur.

October 5, 1858 – Helen Churchill Candee born, American author, journalist, interior decorator and feminist; survivor of the sinking of the Titanic; her book How Women May Earn a Living (1900) was a best-seller, and Decorative Styles and Periods established her design credentials; board member of the National Woman Suffrage Association.

October 5, 1883 – Ida Rubinstein born into a wealthy Jewish family, Russian dancer, art patron and Belle Époque figure. She went to Paris under the guise of continuing her education, but secretly intent on a stage career. Her first appearances in Paris were as an actress in small roles in “indecent” garb. When word got back to her Orthodox family in St. Petersburg, they were horrified. Her brother-in-law, a Parisian doctor had her declared legally insane, and committed to an asylum, but her family demanded she be released and sent home, where she was chaperoned at all times by a governess. To gain her freedom and control of her fortune, she married her first cousin Vladimir Gorvits, who was madly in love with her and allowed her to travel and perform. She was tutored by Mikhail Fokine in ballet, and made her debut in 1908 in a private performance of Oscar Wilde's Salomé, in which she stripped nude in the course of the Dance of the Seven Veils. Sergei Diaghilev took her with the Ballet Russes back to Paris, where she danced the title role of Cléopâtre in the Paris season of 1909, and Zobéide in Scheherazade, partnered with Nijinsky, in 1910. She left the Ballet Russes in 1911 to form her own company, and used her wealth to commission lavish productions, including Le Martyre de Saint Sebastien. The creative team was Fokine (choreography); Bakst (design); Gabriele d'Annunzio (text) and score by Debussy. This was both a triumph for its stylized modernism and a scandal; the Archbishop of Paris prohibited Catholics from attending because St. Sebastian was being played by a woman and a Jew. After WWI, she appeared in plays, and in Istar at the Paris Opera in 1924. She directed her own dance company beginning in 1928, and commissioned Boléro by Maurice Ravel the same year. She closed the company in 1935, but often staged free ballet events and danced in some of them until the start of WWII. She converted to Roman Catholicism in 1936. In 1940, she left France during the German invasion, and made her way to England. There she helped wounded Free French soldiers until 1944. Walter Guinness (later Lord Moyne), her long-term lover and sponsor, remained supportive, providing a suite at the Ritz Hotel, until he was assassinated by Lehi (Zionist paramilitary fanatics) while serving as British Minister Resident in Palestine, in late 1944. She returned to France after the war, living at Les Olivades in Vence, where she died at age 76 in 1960.

October 5, 1889 – Teresa de la Parra born, Venezuelan author; known for Iphigenia: Diary of a young lady who wrote because she was bored.

October 5, 1899 – Elda E. Anderson born, American physicist and health researcher; During WWII, she worked on the Manhattan Project at Princeton University and the Los Alamos Laboratory, where she prepared the first sample of pure uranium-235. After the war, she became the first chief of education and training in the Health Physics Division of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. President of the Health Physics Society (1959-1960). She established the professional certification agency known as the American Board of Health Physics in 1960. She developed leukemia, then breast cancer, and died in 1961 at age 61.

October 5, 1900 – Bing Xin born as Xie Wanying, prolific Chinese poet, novelist, translator and children’s author; elected as a member of the National Senate in 1940, Bing Xin literally translates as “ice heart,” meaning a morally pure heart; The Photograph is an English language translation of her novel, about an American music teacher at a missionary school who adopts an 8-year-old Chinese girl.

October 5, 1900 – Margherita Bontade born, Italian Christian Democracy politician; served in the Chamber of Deputies (1948-1968); the Christian Democracy party was a Catholic-inspired, centrist party founded in 1944, which died out in 1994.

October 5, 1917 – Magda Szabó born, most translated Hungarian author and poet; censured by the Hungarian communist regime for not conforming to socialist realism; known for The Door, Für Elise, and An Old-Fashioned Story.

October 5, 1928 – Louise Fitzhugh born, American author-illustrator; best known for the Harriet the Spy series.

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October 5, 1931 – Rosalie Cheeseman Gower born, Canadian nurse and political activist; a mother of four children, married to an architect who flatly refused to help out at home, she still managed to work as a nurse and as a community activist. She was appointed as a commissioner of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC – 1980-1992), where she was an effective advocate for public interest over industry profits, and improving media portrayals of women, while she maintained a working relationship with officials, advertisers, broadcasters, the public, and feminists demanding change. After she became chair of the commission, during public hearings held in a Vancouver theatre, a woman dressed in black leather wheeled her motorcycle up the aisle, pointed a finger at the stage and demanded to know why there were men on the panel. What could they possibly know about the stereotyping of women? “Well,” Gower said, “Professor Baker must know something about women. He had two grandmothers, a mother, two wives and four daughters.”

October 5, 1932 – Yvonne Braithwaite Burke born, African-American politician, US Congresswoman, Democrat from California.

October 5, 1936 – The Jarrow Crusade: Two hundred men, with Jarrow’s woman Member of Parliament Ellen Wilkinson, begin marching from the town of Jarrow to London, carrying a petition for re-establishment of industry in their town, which had ended when Jarrow’s main employer, Palmer’s shipyard, closed in 1934, after building more than a 1000 ships since 1851. While they were warmly welcomed by the London public, and Parliament received the petition, it was not debated, so the marchers believed they had failed. But the Jarrow March helped foster changes which did lead to major social reforms following WWII.

October 5, 1939 – Marie-Claire Blais born, French Canadian novelist, poet and playwright; noted for her first book, La Belle Bête (Mad Shadows), Une Saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel (A Season in the Life of Emmanuel), and L’Ange de la solitude (The Angel of Solitude). Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada since 1986, and winner of the 1996 Governor General’s Literary Award.

October 5, 1939 – Consuelo Ynares-Santiago born, lawyer and judge; she was the first woman who rose from the ranks to be appointed as a Justice of the Supreme Court of the Philippines (1999-2009); Court of Appeals (1990-1999); Regional Trial Court Judge (1986-1990); Municipal Judge (1973-1986).

October 5, 1944 – French women win the right to vote.

October 5, 1946 – Zahida Hina born in India, Pakistani Urdu-language columnist, essayist, short story writer, novelist and playwright; worked as journalist for Jang (1988-2005) and the Daily express, Pakistan; also writes a weekly column in Rasrang, the Sunday magazine of Dainik Bhaskar, India’s largest Hindi newspaper. She is a critic of nuclear energy for any purpose. Has received many awards, including Saghir Siddiqui Adabi Award, Sindh Speaker Award, and the 2001 SAARC Literary Award given by the President of India.

October 5, 1946 – Michèle Pierre-Louis born, Haitian independent politician; the second woman Prime Minister of Haiti (2008-2009), the first was Claudette Werleigh (1995-1996); Pierre-Louis has been the Executive Director of the Knowledge and Freedom Foundation since 1995.

October 5, 1959 – Maya Lin born, artist and architect of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C. (1980-82) and other public sculptures, author of Boundaries.

October 5, 1964 – Korina Sánchez born, Filipina television journalist, news anchor, field correspondent, radio news anchor and newspaper columnist, Currently Chief Correspondent for the Integrated News and Current Affairs Division of ABS-CBN Corporation, and columnist for The Philippine Star.

October 5, 1971 – Tonia Antoniazzi born, British Labour politician; Member of Parliament for Gower since 2017; she and five other Labour MPs resigned their roles as Labour front benchers to protest the party’s Brexit position, which was to abstain in a vote on whether Britain would remain in the single market by joining the European Economic Area (EEA). The renegade MPs voted in favour of the EEA.

October 5, 1972 – Annely Akkermann born, Estonian politician; Member of the Estonian parliament, Riigikogu, since 2011, and serves on the Ecology Committee and the Select Budgetary Committee. She is also chair of the women’s association of IRL-Naiskogu (IREN).

October 5, 2002 – The first International Day of No Prostitution, supported by the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women.

October 5, 2010 – Irish activist Mairead Maguire lost her appeal against being deported from Israel. She had been denied entry into the country, and then held in a Tel Aviv airport detention facility since her arrival six days earlier for a Nobel women’s peace visit. The Israeli government had instituted a 10-year ban against her for her participation in a Gaza-bound flotilla in 2009, attempting to bring humanitarian aid to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Maguire co-founded Women for Peace with Betty Williams, now called the Community for Peace People. Maguire and Williams were awarded the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to bring about a peaceful solution to ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland.

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October 6, 1565 – Marie de Gournay born, French protofeminist writer; noted for The Equality of Men and Women (1622) and The Ladies’ Grievance (Les femmes et Grief des dames, 1626). She was an advocate for women’s education.

October 6, 1591 – Settimia Caccini born, Italian singer and composer, one of the first women known to have a successful career in music, but her compositions were not published during her lifetime, so most of her work has been lost.

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October 6, 1729 – Sarah Crosby born, considered the first woman to be a Methodist preacher. She and Mary Bosanquet were the most popular women preachers of Methodism of their day, and worked together, co-founding an orphanage, first in Leytonstone, and then moving it to Yorkshire. Crosby continued traveling and preaching, writing that she had traveled 960 miles in the year 1777 alone, until rheumatism curtailed her travels, but she was still teaching and preaching at local meetings the week before her death in 1804.

October 6, 1820 – Jenny Lind born, Swedish opera star, known as the “Swedish Nightingale.” She became a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music in 1840. In 1850, she gave 93 large-scale concerts in the U.S., earning over $350,000 USD, which she donated to charities, mainly for the endowment of free schools in Sweden. After she retired from the stage, except for an occasional concert, in 1882, she became a professor of singing at the newly founded Royal College of Music in London. She died in 1887, bequeathing a considerable part of her fortune to help poor students in Sweden receive an education.

October 6, 1847 – Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is published in London.

October 6, 1895 – Caroline Gordon born, American novelist and literary critic; associated with the Southern Agrarian writers in the 1930s. She was awarded the O. Henry Award second-place prize for her 1934 short story “Old Red,” which placed higher than short stories by William Saroyan, Pearl S. Buck, Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Thomas Wolfe. Also noted as the mentor of novelists Walker Percy and Brainard Cheney.

October 6, 1897 – Florence B. Seibert born, American biochemist who found that the cause of fever in many patients after being given intravenous injections was contamination during the distillation of water being used in the injections, and developed a device to prevent contamination; but Seibert is best known for indentifying the active agent in the antigen tuberculin as a protein, and isolated a purified form which became the basis of the development and use of the first reliable test for TB, and quickly became the international standard tuberculin test. For this breakthrough, she received the Trudeau Medal from the National Tuberculosis Association in 1938, the American Chemical Society’s Francis P. Garvan Medal in 1942, and the first Achievement Award given by the American Association of University Women in 1943. She was at the Henry Phipps Institute at the University of Pennsylvania from 1932 to 1959, and was finally made a full professor of biochemistry in 1955, just four years before her retirement. Her later research was a study of bacteria associated with some types of cancers. Seibert was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1990.

October 6, 1900 – Vivion Lenon Brewer born, American activist for desegregation. She was a graduate in 1917 of the high school which later was called Little Rock Central High School, in Little Rock, Arkansas, and went on to get degrees in sociology and the law. In 1957, Governor Orval Faubus called out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent nine black students from entering Central High School, and a majority of citizens of Little Rock voted to close the city’s public high schools rather than integrate them. In 1958, Brewer was a founding member with Adolphine Fletcher Terry of the Women’s Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools (WEC). Brewer became the chair and spokesperson for the WEC, making her the target of threats and offensive phone calls and mail. The schools were re-opened in 1959, and she resigned as chair of the WEC in 1960. She wrote about the WEC in The Embattled Ladies of Little Rock: 1958-1963, The Struggle to Save Public Education at Central High.

October 6, 1901 – Eveline Du Bois-Reymond Marcus born, German-Brazilian zoologist, artist and academic; she and her husband, Ernst Marcus, collaborated in studies of several invertebrate groups between 1924 and 1936, but when he was dismissed from his professorship at Berlin University due to the rise of Nazism, they moved to São Paulo, Brazil, where he taught at the University of São Paulo, where they mainly studied freshwater and land invertebrates. After her husband's death in 1968, she continued their studies, publishing about 30 papers, mostly on opistobranch molluscs. In 1973, she was elected an Honorary Member of the Brazilian Malacological Society and in 1979 of the Malacological Society of London. She was also awarded the title of Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of São Paulo in 1976.

October 6, 1905 – Helen Wills Moody born, who dominated American women’s tennis in the 1920s and 1930s with 8 Wimbledon titles and 7 U.S. singles titles. She played in knee-length pleated skirts rather than the longer ones of her predecessors, and she practiced against men to hone her skills. Wills played a relentless game, wearing down her women opponents with power and accuracy. In 1933 she beat the 8th-ranked U.S. male player in an exhibition match. Wills wrote a coaching manual, Tennis; her autobiography, Fifteen-Thirty: The Story of a Tennis Player; and a mystery with Robert Murphy, Death Serves an Ace. She also wrote articles for The Saturday Evening Post and other magazines.

October 6, 1910 – Barbara Castle born, English politician, Member of Parliament for Blackburn (1945-79) the longest-serving woman MP in the House of Commons.

October 6, 1914 – Joan Littlewood born, English theatre director, known for work in developing the Theatre Workshop group, called "Mother of Modern Theatre" — best known for her 1963 production of "Oh, What a Lovely War!"

October 6, 1914 – Mary Louise Smith born, Republican Party committeewoman, and second woman to be chair of a major political party (1974-1977). Smith organized the 1976 Republican National Convention in Kansas City; she was an elementary school teacher become becoming involved with politics. Smith was a supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment and pro-choice.

October 6, 1915 – Carolyn D. Goodman born, American clinical psychologist, opponent to McCathyism in the 1950s, and prominent civil rights advocate after her son Andrew and two other civil rights workers were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Neshoba County, Mississippi in 1964; co-author with Brad Herzog of My Mantelpiece: A Memoir of Survival and Social Justice. Goodman, at the age of 90, testified at the murder trial of Edgar Ray Killen, a former Klan leader finally indicted in the case. On June 21, 2005, the 41st anniversary of the killings, a jury acquitted Killen of murder but found him guilty of manslaughter in the deaths of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner.

October 6, 1915 – Alice Timander born, Swedish dentist who became the youngest woman dentist in Sweden in 1937 at age 21. After she married actor Bengt Logardt, she sometimes appeared as an extra in plays and movies. In 1949, the Swedish Dental Association considered expelling her because she appeared publicly in a bikini. With her second husband, dentist Torsten Timander, she set up volunteer dental practices in Morocco and Egypt. She became a ‘red carpet’ celebrity, appearing at major theatrical premieres. Timander was an advocate for free dental care for homeless and elderly people. She was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2006, and died in 2007, at age 91.

October 6, 1917 – Fannie Lou Hamer born, civil rights leader, voting rights crusader, women’s rights activist, community organizer and singer; co-founder of the Freedom Democratic Party. She was a key organizer of the Mississippi Freedom Summer (1964), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Also a co-founder of the National Women’s Political Caucus to recruit, support and train women of all races seeking election to office. While having surgery in 1961 to remove a tumor, 44-year-old Hamer was also given a hysterectomy without consent by a white doctor, a frequent occurrence under Mississippi's compulsory sterilization plan to reduce the number of poor blacks in the state. Hamer is credited with coining the phrase "Mississippi appendectomy" as a euphemism for the involuntary or uninformed sterilization of black women. She died of complications of hypertension and breast cancer in 1977 at age 59.

October 6, 1925 – Shana Alexander born, journalist, and author; first woman staff writer hired by LIFE magazine; known for her ‘Point-Counterpoint’ debate segments on 60 Minutes with conservative James Kirkpatrick; her books include Talking Woman; Anyone’s Daughter; The Astonishing Elephant; When She Was Bad; and The Pizza Connection: Lawyers, Money, Drugs, Mafia.

October 6, 1939 – Sheila A. Greibach born, theoretical computer scientist; currently Emeritus Professor, professor in the UCLA Computer Science Department since 1970 ; member of the faculty of the Harvard Division of Engineering and Applied Physics (1963-1969); noted for work in formal computing languages, automata, compiler theory, and context-sensitive parsing using the stack automaton model. The Greibach normal form, and Greibach’s theorem are named for her.

October 6, 1949 – Penny Junor born, English journalist, television presenter and author; columnist for Private Eye magazine; host of 4 What It’s Worth (1982-1989) , a Channel 4 consumer advice programme, where she also worked as an investigative reporter. Noted as the author of several books on the British Royal Family, and biographies of figures in politics and the entertainment field.

October 6, 1952 – Agatha Christie’s play The Mousetrap opens in London, beginning the longest run of a theatrical production in British history.

October 6, 1952 – Ayten Mutlu born, Turkish poet, writer and translator, specializing in translating women poets from antiquity.

October 6, 1956 – Kathleen Webb born, American comic book artist and writer; one of the first women writers for Archie Comics; she got her start in 1985 by writing a fan letter to the artist Dan DeCarlo, who encouraged her to submit a script, then worked for 25 years as a scriptwriter for Archie Comics.

October 6, 1965 – Peg O’Connor born, American Feminist philosopher; Professor of Philosophy and Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota; noted for work on Wittenstein’s approach to ethics, the philosophy of addiction, and gender equity in the field of philosophy; author of Life on the rocks: finding meaning in addiction and recovery, and co-author of Feminist interpretations of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

October 6, 1970 – Maria Kannegaard born in Denmark, Norwegian jazz musician and composer; she is noted for composing music for the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra.

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October 6, 1978 – Liu Yang born, astronaut, first Chinese woman in space.

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October 7, 1819 – Ann Eliza Brainerd Smith born, American novelist, poet, essayist and organizer; she used the penname Mrs. J. Gregory Smith for her work, including her novels, Seola, Selma, and Atla, and her non-fiction book, From Dawn to Sunrise. Her husband, J. Gregory Smith, was governor of Vermont (1863-1865), and instrumental in obtaining medical care for Vermont soldiers at the front, and securing the right of soldiers in the field to vote by absentee ballot. On October 19, 1884, the northern-most event of the U.S. Civil War occurred in Smith’s town of St. Albans, Vermont. Confederate raiders robbed the town’s banks, killed one resident and wounded another, then went to the Smith home. Governor Smith was in Montpelier for the session of the legislature. Mrs. Smith, home with only her daughters and a woman servant, appeared at the front door with a pistol (unloaded, but the only weapon she could find), and the Confederates decided to move on, fleeing for the border to Canada. She organized the people of St. Albans to mount a pursuit, attempting unsuccessfully to stop the raiders from crossing the border. In 1870, Vermont Governor Peter Washburn, who had been Adjutant General of the Vermont Militia during the war, presented her with an honorary commission as a lieutenant colonel on his military staff. Smith was president of the committee for the Vermont Woman’s exhibition at the Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia.

October 7, 1865 – Martha McChesney Berry born, educator, founder of Berry College in Georgia; in 1902 she opened the Boys’ Industrial School. Her plan was to supplement the school’s resources, which at first came entirely out of her pocket, by having the students, who were generally of high-school age, contribute labour for two hours a day in a pioneering work-study program; the experience of work would enhance their vocational training. Applicants quickly outnumbered the places available, and Berry solicited donations from Northern philanthropists Andrew Carnegie and especially Henry Ford, who over the years gave nearly $4 million. The tours she arranged for visiting benefactors were masterpieces of showmanship, the carefully arranged rustic charm of the school and grounds never failing to impress. In November 1909, concerned over the lack of suitable wives for her graduates, she opened the Martha Berry School for Girls on the same work-study basis. Both schools (the boys’ later renamed Mount Berry School for Boys) continued to emphasize self-help, and vocational, agricultural, and domestic training. In 1916 the program was expanded to include a grammar school, and 10 years later a junior college was established, which became a four-year college in 1930. The state of Georgia followed her example, opening eleven schools modeled on the Berry schools by 1912, and other states followed Georgia.

October 7, 1888 – Edna Meade Colson born, African American educator and activist; in spite of obstacles she faced because she was a black woman, she got her B.A. in 1915, and a Ph.D. in 1940, which made her a champion higher education for black Americans. Colson taught from 1915 until her retirement in 1953 at the Virginia Normal and Industrial Institute, renamed the Virginia State College for Negroes in 1930 (now Virginia State University). In 1937, she was chair of the committee that organized the first graduate studies program at the school. She was among the first women who registered to vote after the 19^th Amendment was ratified, and one of the first African American women to become a lifetime member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

October 7, 1893 – Alice Dalgliesh born in Trinidad, American author of both fiction and nonfiction, mainly for young readers; founding editor of Scribner’s and Sons Children’s Book Division; first president of the Children’s Book Council; noted for her books The Silver Pencil; The Bears on Hemlock Mountain; and The Courage of Sarah Noble, which named to the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award list.

October 7, 1907 – Helen MacInnes born in Scotland, American librarian and author of spy thrillers; The Unconquerable, The Venetian Affair, The Salzburg Connection.

October 7, 1909 – Anni Blomqvist born, Finnish-Swedish author; known for Against the Forces of the Sea, and the Anna Beata series.

October 7, 1913 – Elizabeth Janeway born, social analyst of 20th century women’s equality drive, wrote Man’s World, Women’s Place and Powers of the Weak.

October 7, 1919 – Henriette Avram born, American computer scientist and academic; developed the MARC format (Machine Readable Cataloging), the international data standard for bibliographic and holdings information in libraries.

October 7, 1920 – Kathryn Clarenback born, chair of the Wisconsin Commission on the Status of Women (1964-1969 and 1971-1979), which discovered 280 provisions in state statutes that treated women differently from men. Founding member and member of the Executive Board of the National Organization for Women (NOW). She was the experienced organizer, who pulled together women from across the country and from wildly different backgrounds, to turn NOW from an idea born of frustration with the status quo into an effective force in American politics. Executive director of the National Committee on the Observance of International Women’s Year (1977).

October 7, 1928 – Lorna Wing born, British physician-psychiatrist, childhood developmental disorders pioneer, developed treatment of Autism as a spectrum disorder, coined term Asperger Syndrome, leader in founding UK National Autistic Society.

October 7, 1937 – Maria Szyszkowska born, Polish politician, a leader of the socialist party Reason of the Polish Left; president of the Association of Free Thought; former senator for the Warsaw district, and a judge on the State Tribunal (1993-1997).

October 7,1946 – Catherine A. MacKinnon born, American radical feminist, lawyer, and legal scholar; she argues that sexual harassment is a form of sexual discrimination under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act; also a vocal opponent to all pornography as objectifying women and a form of sexual trafficking; has stated that all heterosexual sex is an act of oppression of women.

October 7, 1948 – Diane Ackerman born, American poet, essayist, and naturalist; her bestseller, A Natural History of the Senses was made into a 1995 PBS series which she hosted. A molecule that is the secretory product from a crocodile was named dianeackerone in her honor. Also noted for The Moon by Whale Light: And Other Adventures Among Bats, Penguins, Crocodilians, and Whales.

October 7, 1953 – Linda Griffiths born, Canadian performer, primarily on stage, and playwright; co-founder of the Saskatchewan 25th Street Theatre; noted for her one-woman play Maggie and Pierre in which she played both Pierre and Margaret Trudeau. Died of breast cancer at age 60.

October 7, 1954 – Marian Anderson becomes the first black singer to be hired by the NY Metropolitan Opera Company.

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October 7, 1959 – Lourdes Flores Nano born, Peruvian lawyer and politician; councilwoman of Lima, former member of the Chamber of Deputies (1990-1992); first woman to chair the Partido Popular Cristiano (Christian People’s Party – 2003-2011).

October 7, 1967 – Michelle Alexander born, writer, civil rights activist, academic and columnist at The New York Times; best known for her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

October 7, 2006 – Anna Politkovskaya, journalist who chronicled Russian military abuses against civilians in Chechnya, found shot to death in Moscow.

October 7, 2011 – The winners of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize are announced: Yemeni women's rights activist Tawakkul Karman, Liberian activist Leymah Gbowee and Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.

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October 8, 1645 – Jeanne Mance, French nurse and pioneering settler in Quebec province, opens its first hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal, in Montreal, Quebec.

October 8, 1807 – Harriet Taylor Mill born, English philosopher and women’s rights advocate; second wife of John Stuart Mill, who influenced his views on the status of women. Co-author with Mill of “The Enfranchisement of Women” published in 1851: htttp://www.laits.utexas.edu/poltheory/jsmill/diss-disc/eow.html

October 8, 1826 – Emily Blackwell born, sister of Elizabeth Blackwell, third U.S. woman to earn a medical degree.

October 8, 1847 – Rose Scott born, Australian women’s rights and suffrage activist and speaker in New South Wales; co-founder of the Women’s Literary Society in Sydney, first President of the Women’s Political Education League; successfully worked for the Early Closing Act of 1899, which gave shorter evening hours to shop girls, as well as working for appointment of matrons at police stations and women inspectors in shops and factories, improving conditions for women prisoners, and New South Wales legislation raising the age of consent from 14 to 16; president of women's committee of the Prisoners' Aid Association.

October 8, 1872 – Kristine Bonnevie born, Norwegian zoologist and geneticist who in 1911 became the first woman admitted to the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. In 1912, the University of Oslo was appointed her as Norway's first woman professor. One of her students in the 1930's was Thor Heyerdahl who later organized and led the famous Kon-Tiki (1947) and Ra (1969-70) transoceanic scientific expeditions.

October 8, 1872 – Mary Engle Pennington born, American bacteriological chemist and refrigeration engineer; first head of the Food Research Laboratory of the USDA (1907), developed safety standards for food processing and shipping; founder of the Household Refrigeration Bureau in 1923 to educate consumers on safe practices in domestic refrigeration, publishing pamphlets such as The Care of the Child’s Food in the Home (1925) and Cold is the Absence of Heat (1927).

October 8, 1881 – Esther Lape born, co-founder League of Women Voters, championed U.S. participation in the Permanent Court of International Justice, which failed by 7 votes in the Senate (1935), worked for compulsory health insurance, which was supported by Presidents Truman and Eisenhower but defeated by the AMA.

October 8, 1891 – Ellen Wilkinson born, British Labour MP, only woman on the Jarrow March; served as a junior minister in the WWII Ministry of Home Security, then Minister of Education until her death (1945-1947).

October 8, 1902 – Marina Tsvetaeva born, notable Russian poet who committed suicide in 1941 after her husband was executed by the Soviets on espionage charges.

October 8, 1929 – Betty Boothroyd born, English academic and politician, Labour MP for West Bromwich (1973-1992), first woman to serve as Speaker of the House of Commons (1992-2000); currently President of NBFA Assisting the Elderly.

October 8, 1930 – Faith Ringgold born, African American artist, noted for her narrative quilts, masks and sculptures. She was also an activist for civil and women’s rights, and was a member of Women Artists in Revolution (WAR), and co-founded Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation (WSABAL). In 1950, she had enrolled at City College of New York, but was not allowed to major in art because at the time art education was the only art-related major open to women at CCNY. She got her BA in 1955, and began teaching in NY public schools, and earned her Master’s in 1959. A trip to Europe that year, and two trips to West Africa in 1976 and 1977 all had an impact on her work. She also wrote and illustrated 17 children’s books.

October 8, 1937 – Merle Park born in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), British prima ballerina with the Royal Ballet, where she started in the corps de ballet in 1954, then became a soloist in 1958, and a principal dancer in 1962; best remembered for Giselle, but was often paired with Nureyev, Anthony Dowell, and Mikhail Baryshnikov.

October 8, 1946 – Hanan Ashrawi born, Palestinian Third Way politician, activist and scholar, a leader during the First Intifada, and Palestinian Delegation spokesperson during the Middle East peace process; first woman elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council; also served on advisor boards for the World Bank, the UN Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD)and the International Human Rights Council; chair of the English Department at Birzeit University (1973-1978 and 1981-1984) and Dean of its Faculty of Arts (1986-1990); founder in 1974 of the Birzeit University Legal Aid and Human Rights Action Project; awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in 2003.

October 8, 1946 – Bel Mooney born, English journalist, broadcaster, author and columnist; has written for Nova magazine, New Statesman, Daily Mirror, The Sunday Times, and is a weekly columnist for the Daily Mail; Mooney was a broadcaster for BBC Radio 4 (1982-2008), notably for Devout Sceptics; novelist and children’s author, known for her best-selling children’s series Kitty and Friends, and her children’s novel The Voices of Silence, awarded a New York Public Library Book of the Year citation.

October 8, 1949 – Ashawna Hailey born as Shawn Hailey, American computer scientist, creator of the HSPICE program used by much of the semiconductor industry to simulate and design silicon chips; founder of Meta-Software, which later became part of Synopsis; she was a trans woman; noted as an activist for the reform of laws on creational drugs; after her death in 2011, a $10 million USD bequest was shared between Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. The ACLU, Drug Policy Alliance, Marijuana Policy Project and Second Harvest Food Bank.

October 8, 1949 – Sigourney Weaver born as Susan Weaver, American actress and three-time nominee for Academy Awards; environmental activist who was spoken out on threats to the oceans from deep-sea trawling, and is the honorary chair of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.

October 8, 1951 – Shannon C. Stimson born, American political theorist, philosopher and economics historian; Professor of Political Science at University of California Berkeley since 1991, and presently serves on the editorial board of the Adam Smith Review; author of The American Revolution in the law: Anglo-American jurisprudence before John Marshall, and co-author of After Adam Smith: a century of transformation in politics and political economy.

October 8, 1956 – Janice E. Voss born, American electrical engineer with a doctorate in aeronautics & astronautics from MIT; NASA astronaut (1990 group), who flew in space as a mission specialist on five missions, and participated in the first Shuttle rendezvous with the Mir Space Station in 1995; she died in 2012 from breast cancer.

October 8, 1958 – Ursula von der Leyen born in Belgium, German Christian Democratic Union politician; incoming President of the European Commission (the EU’s executive branch - assuming office November 2019); first woman Minister of Defence for Germany (2013-2019); Deputy Leader of the CDU party since 2009; Minister for Labour and Social Affairs (2009-2013); Minister of Family, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth (2005-2009), where she instituted extensive blocking of child pornography on the internet, which was overturned as censorship by the federal criminal police office, Bundeskriminalamt (BKA); Member of the Bundestag for Lower Saxony since 2009; noted for support of equal opportunities for women in politics, and in favor of same-sex marriage/adoption rights.

October 8, 1971 – P1nar Selek born, Turkish sociologist, feminist and author; advocate for the rights of vulnerable communities in Turkey, including women, the poor, street children, sexual minorities, and Kurdish communities. She is the author of several books published in Turkish, German, and French, and is one of the founding editors of Amargi, a Turkish feminist journal. Selek is currently living in exile in France, because of a 20-years series of prosecutions connected to a 1998 explosion in Istanbul’s Spice Bazaar which killed 7 people and wounded about 100 others. The arrest is widely considered as motivated by her work with the Kurds, particularly her contact with the banned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). Her academic research papers were confiscated, and she refused to name the individuals she had interviewed for her project. She spent 2 ½ years in prison, ill-treated and tortured, but was released in 2002 when a team of experts issued reports which concluded that the explosion had been caused by the accidental ignition of a gas cylinder, not a bomb. She has since been tried and acquitted of all charges in four trials, in 2006, 2008, 2011, and 2014, but in 2017 the Chief Prosecutor of the Supreme Court demanded that her most recent acquittal be reversed, and her case is once again being considered; at stake is a sentence of life imprisonment; Interpol is ignoring the warrant the Turkish government issued for her arrest.

October 8, 1984 – Anne Murray becomes the first woman to win the Country Music Associations Album of the Year Award for A Little Good News. The Anne Murray Centre, located in her hometown of Springhill, aims to foster tourism in the area and promote awareness of the music of Nova Scotia and Canada. All the revenue generated from its operation is used to provide employment for local people and for its ongoing maintenance.

October 8, 1991 – International Lesbian Day is started in Australia and New Zealand.

October 8, 1993 – Toni Morrison becomes the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

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October 9, 1823 – Mary Shadd Cary born, American-Canadian abolitionist, journalist and the first black woman newspaper editor in North America, of the Provincial Freeman, in Windsor, Canada, which helped freed slaves to know their rights.

October 9, 1830 – Harriet Hosmer born, American sculptor who worked in Rome, one of the few women to win complete financial independence through her artistic work. She was part of an ex-pat American and British community of writers and artists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Vinnie Ream and Anna Stebbins

October 9, 1883 – Maria Filotti born, Romanian actress and director of the "Teatrul Comunal" ("The Communal Theatre") in Brăila, Romania, and renamed in 1969, the Maria Fioltti Theatre in her honor. She had a distinguished stage career, where she was regarded as one of the “prestigious actors of the great realistic school," and also appeared in several silent films. Her autobiography, Am ales teatrul (I Chose the Theatre), was published in 1961, five years after her death.

October 9, 1884 – Helen Deutsch born in Poland, Polish-American Freudian psychoanalyst, one of the first psychoanalysts to specialize in women; author of the 2-volume The Psychology of Women, with emphasis on motherhood; many of her ideas are now considered out-of-date.

October 9, 1890 – Aimee Semple McPherson born in Canada, Pentecostal evangelist and media celebrity who skillfully used radio to build up her image; there are still unresolved questions about whether or not she engineered her own kidnapping in 1926 when she disappeared for five weeks, causing an all-out media frenzy.

October 9, 1892 – Abigail Eliot born, American authority on early childhood education; founding member of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, which established standards, and monitors the quality of education; founder of the Ruggles Street Nursery school in 1922, which also trained teachers in early childhood education, later became the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study at Tufts University. The Eliot-Pearson Award, known as the “Abby,” honors outstanding contributions to children’s media.

October 9, 1901 – Alice Mae Lee Jemison born, member of the Seneca tribe, Indian nations rights activist; journalist, and critic of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the policies of its commissioner John Collier. She fought for the diversity of Indian cultures, protesting against a monolithic, romantic notion of primitives

Seneca artifacts — headdress and crane comb —found no picture of **Alice Mae Lee Jemison**

October 9,1915 – Belva Plain born, best-selling American novelist of popular and historical fiction; known for the Werner Family Saga.

October 9, 1926 – Danièle Delorme born as Gabrielle Danièle Girard, French actress and film producer; she appeared in over 60 films, including the title role of Gigi in the original 1948 French film, and co-founded Renn Productions in the 1970s with her second husband, actor/filmmaker Yves Robert. Delorme served on the Caméra d'Or jury at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival.

October 9, 1930 – Aviator Laura Ingalls (not the author) becomes the first woman to fly across the U.S., completing a nine-stop journey from New York’s Roosevelt Field to Glendale CA; holds several other records, including first woman to fly solo over the Andes.

October 9, 1934 – Jill Ker Conway born in Australia, academic, historian and author; first woman president of Smith College (1975-1985), where she engaged in creative circumvention of Massachusetts welfare laws so single-parent scholarship students would not have to choose between welfare benefits to support their families or scholarships to continue their education, leading to a change in Massachusetts welfare laws to enable students to keep their benefits and their scholarships.

October 9, 1944 – Rita Donaghy born, British academic administrator, trade unionist, Labour life peer of the House of Lords; President of the trade union NALGO (National and Local Government Officers’ Association – 1989-1990).

October 9, 1944 – Nona Hendryx born, American vocalist, songwriter and record producer; member of Labelle and Talking Heads, as well as transitioning into a successful solo career. She has openly discussed her bisexuality, and is a LGBT rights activist. In 2008, she joined Cindi Lauper on her True Colors Tour, to raise awareness of discrimination against the LGBT community.

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October 9, 1950 – Jody Williams born, American academic, author and political activist for human rights and women’s rights; founding coordinator of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) and winner of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts toward banning anti-personnel mines.

October 9, 1961 – Ellen Wheeler born, American actress, television director and producer.

October 9, 1980 – Lucy Akello born, Ugandan social worker and Forum for Democratic Change politician; current member of the Ugandan parliament, since 2016. In 2005, she was hired by Justice & Peace Commission (JPC), a local non-government organization within the Catholic Church that promotes peace and reconciliation in war-torn Northern Uganda. She worked there for ten years, beginning as a program officer, then as a program manager and from 2006 until 2014, as the executive director. She focused on human rights, land rights, women’s rights and children’s rights.

October 9, 1980 – Sarah Lovell born, Australian Labor politician; member of the Tasmanian Legislative Council for Rumney since 2017; before running for public office, she was a union representative for United Voice (a large trade union representing workers in a wide range of occupations).

October 9, 2012 – The Pakistani Taliban make a failed attempt to assassinate 15-year-old Malala Yousafzai for speaking out for the rights of girls to an education; her survival in spite of severe injuries, and courage in continuing to speak out, sparks international support for her and her cause.

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October 10, 1870 – Louise Mack born, Australian poet and journalist-columnist, pioneering woman correspondent, eye witness to the WWI German invasion of Antwerp.

October 10, 1888 – Dorothy Ferebee born, gained medical internship at Freedman’s Hospital despite rampant sexism, then built a 47-year association with Howard University hospital and the District of Columbia.

October 10, 1898 – Lily Daché born in France, American fashion designer, entrepeneur and author, noted for her hat designs; author of Lilly Daché's Glamour Book and her autobiography, Talking through My Hats.

October 10, 1900 – Helen Hayes born as Helen Hays Brown, American actress of stage, screen and television, whose career spanned 80 years, dubbed the “First Lady of the American Theatre.” She is one of only 15 performers who have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony Award. Hayes also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the National Medal of Arts. In 1982, she was a co-founder with Ladybird Johnson of the National Wildflower Research Center. Hayes was a notable philanthropist, donating time and money to several causes, especially New York’s Riverside Shakespeare Company, and the Helen Hayes Hospital, a physical rehabilitation hospital, which was renamed in her honor in 1974, after she had served on its Board of Visitors since 1944, advocating tirelessly for the hospital and raising funds.

October 10, 1903 – The Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) is founded by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia in Manchester, later moving operations to London, a militant organization campaigning for suffrage for British women. The slogan of the WSPU was “Deeds, not words.”

October 10, 1905 – Aksella Luts born as Aksella Kapsta, Estonian actress, screenwriter, dancer, choreographer, film editor and photojournalist. She and her husband Theodore Luts founded the Tartu Filmiühing (Tartu Film Society), and co-authored the script for Estonia’s first feature-length dramatic silent film, Noored kotkad (Young Eagles), about the 1918-1920 Estonian War of Independence, and the script for the 1932 melodrama Päikese lapsed (The Children Of The Sun). The film was Estonia's first feature-length Estonian language sound film, for which Aksella Kuts choreographed a dance sequence. They moved to Finland in 1938, and Aksella worked as screenwriter for Fenno-Filmi OY under the masculine pen name Antti Metsalu. In 1944, they moved to Stockhom, Sweden, where she worked as a librarian and archivist for the Folk Universitetet. After WWII and the Soviet annexation of Estonia, they relocated to Brazil, where they founded a new film company, Theodor Lutsu firma, and she also worked oher jobs, including film editing for another company. Her husband died in 1980, and in 1996, she returned to Estonia, where she gave television and radio interviews under her death in 2005 at age 99.

October 10, 1908 – Mercè Rodoreda born, Spanish author, notable Catalan-language novelist and short story writer; Catalan is spoken primarily in Catalonia, Valencia, and the Balearic Islands.

October 10, 1911 – Clare Hollingworth born, British journalist and author; in 1939, as a reporter for The Daily Telegraph traveling from Poland to Germany, she saw and reported German forces massed on the Polish border, and became the first war correspondent to report the outbreak of WWII; she was at the scene when the King David Hotel in Jerusalem was bombed in 1946, and reported on the Algerian War in the early 1960s; she broke the story of Kim Philby’s defection to the Soviet Union in 1963, and covered the Vietnam War beginning in 1967.

October 10, 1924 – Ludmilla Tchérina born in Paris to an exiled Circassian noble and a French mother; French prima ballerina, choreographer, artist and author of two novels.

October 10, 1931 – Alice Munro born, Canadian author, primarily known for her collections of short stories, won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

October 10, 1935 – Judith Chalmers born, British radio and television presenter; best known for presenting ITV’s travel programme Wish You Were Here . . .?, from 1974 to 2003. She began working for BBC Radio at age 13, on the BBC Northern Children’s Hour (1948). In the 1960s she was a presenter on BBC Radio’s Family Favourites, and Woman's Hour.

October 10, 1938 – Gloria Coates born, composer of 16 modern symphonies, as well as chamber music and works for solo instruments.

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October 10, 1938 – Lily Tuck born, American author; her novel The News from Paraguay won the 2004 National Book Award for Fiction.

October 10, 1950 – Eleanor Robertson born, prolific American novelist who writes romance novels under the pen name Nora Roberts, and mysteries as J.D. Robb. She founded the Nora Roberts Foundation to promote literacy and the arts, assist children in need, engage in humanitarian efforts, and fund an academic scholarship program.

October 10, 1950 – Dame Dela Smith born, British educator and authority on special needs education; Headteacher at the special education school Beaumont Hill Technology College (1992-2010), where students are ages 5 to 19, with a wide range of special education needs.

October 10, 1953 – Fiona Rae born in Hong Kong, British artist, part of the visual arts group, Young British Artists, who first exhibited together in 1988; elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 2002.

She Pricked Her Finger Cutting the Clouds — by Fiona Rae

October 10, 1958 – Julia Sweeney born, American comedian, actress and writer; Saturday Night Live cast member (1990-1994); alumni of The Groundlings improvisational troupe’s Sunday Company (1988-1989); co-star of the Hulu comedy web TV series, Shrill, which premiered in March, 2019; noted for writing monologues, including God Said Ha!, In the Family Way and Letting Go of God. She is on the Boards of the Secular Coalition for America, Freedom from Religion Foundation, and the Center for Inquiry.

October 10, 1969 – Dilsa Demirbag-Sten born, Kurdish-Swedish author and journalist; she is Secretary General of Berättarministeriet, a foundation to enhance education for children and young people she co-founded together with Robert Weil and Sven Hagströmer in 2011. Demirbag-Sten is a member of the Swedish Press Council, anmd frequent contributor to Swedish newspapers. In 2018, she was awarded the St. Erik medal for her contributions to Stockholm county. Her books include Stamtavlor (Pedigress) and Fosterland.

October 10, 1974 – Lucy Powell born, British Labour and Co-operative politician; Member of Parliament for Manchester Central since 2012.

October 10, 1978 – Naomi Levari born in the U.S., her family moved to Jerusalem when she was age 5; Israeli film producer and director; co-founder of Black Sheep Productions; Levari is dedicated to improving the status and representation of women in the Israeli film industry, and is the founder of the Center for Equal Opportunities in the Film and Television Industry. Noted for her documentaroes, Blue White Collar Criminal; Ameer Got His Gun; and Teacher Irena, and as co-producer on Farewell Herr Schwarz, a multiple award-winner.

October 10, 1983 – Dr. Barbara McClintock wins Nobel Prize for Medicine, for discovery of mobile genetic elements.

October 10, 1989 – Emer Kenny born, British actress and television writer; noted for writing several episodes of the long-running EastEnders series between 2012 and 2014.

October 10, 2005 – Angela Merkel, leader of the Christian Democratic Union party, becomes Germany’s first woman chancellor.

October 10, 2014 – Malala Yousafzai, Pakistani girls’ education activist, wins Nobel Peace Prize, shared with Indian child rights activist Kailash Satyarthi.

October 10, 2017 – New Yorker magazine publishes allegations of 3 women that Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein had raped them, and statements of 10 more women that Weinstein had sexually assaulted or harassed them. Weinstein’s wife Georgina Chapman announced she is leaving him, calling his reported actions “unforgivable.” This followed an October 5 report published in the New York Times, detailing allegations of decades of sexual harassment by Weinstein, including statements by actresses Rose McGowan and Ashley Judd, and the October 8 firing of Weinstein by his company’s board.

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October 11, 1793 – Maria James born in Wales, American poet; emigrated to the U.S. with her family at age 7; after she was found to make neat stitches but sewed too slowly, her apprenticeship to a dressmaker was ended, and she went into domestic service, most often as a nursery maid. She wrote poetry in her limited spare time. In 1833, Sarah Nott Potter returned from a visit to friends, and showed her husband, Bishop Alonzo Potter, a copy of a poem written by a young woman in service to the family she visited . The Bishop was intrigued, and sought more poems written by Maria James. In 1839, he arranged for the publication of Wales and other Poems, with a lengthy introduction written by himself, telling readers that Maria James “solaced a life of labor with intellectual occupations," and that "her achievements should be made known to repress the supercilious pride of the privileged and educated."

October 11, 1841 – Lucy Maria Field Wanzer born in Wisconsin; her family moved to California in 1858. She applied to the Toland Medical College in San Francisco, but was rejected. In 1873, the school was absorbed into the University of California system, and Wanser appealed her rejection to the UC board of regents. She was admitted, after a four-month appeal that set a precedent, allowing other women to attend medical schools throughout the UC system. Even though she was hazed by some male students, and one professor told her any woman who wanted to study medicine should have their ovaries removed, to which she replied that male students should have their testicles removed, Wanzer graduated with honors in 1876. After graduation, she was admitted to the San Francisco County Medical Society, but only after threats to "blackball" her failed. Her private practice, in a series of downtown San Francisco offices, focused on obstetrics and gynecology. In 1890, she was elected president of the University of California Medical Department Alumni Society. Wanzer was also a practicing pediatrician, and helped establish the San Francisco Children's Hospital.

October 11, 1871 – Harriet Boyd Hawes born, American archaeologist and social activist noted for her discoveries of ancient remains in Crete. She went to Crete in 1900, and with the encouragement of Sir Arthur Evans, began to excavate a Minoan site at Kavousi where she discovered some Iron Age Tombs. From 1901-1905 she led a large team that excavated the early Bronze Age Minoan town of Gournia, becoming the first woman to head a major archaeological dig. As a community of humble artisans, Gournia was of particular interest to archaeologists, complementing as it did the more elaborate palaces being unearthed at Knossos and elsewhere. In 1908 she published her monumental work on Gournia. During WWI, she went to Corfu to help nurse the Serbians (1916).

October 11, 1872 – Emily Wilding Davison born, British suffragette and teacher, jailed and force-fed numerous times, dies from injuries caused when she stepped in front of the horse owned by King George V during the 1913 running of the Epsom Derby, trying to gain attention for the cause of suffrage.

October 11, 1874 – Mary Heaton Vorse O’Brien born, labor and human rights activist, journalist, and author, noted for Sinister Romance: Collected ghost stories. As a journalist, she covered labor and social strife in the United States, and was fired upon by vigilantes during a strike at the Republic Steel Corporation plant in Youngstown, Ohio, in June 1937. The Associated Press sent out a photograph nationwide showing Vorse looking slightly stunned but still coolly determined, an open gash on the left side of her head where her temple had been grazed by a bullet, with blood running down on to her blouse front. The caption included this cautionary note to editors: “Mrs. Vorse requested this photo not be used in New York and Boston because of the effect it might have on her daughter.”

October 11, 1884 – Eleanor Roosevelt born, civil and women’s rights advocate; U.S. First Lady (1933-45); only female member of U.S. delegation to the United Nations (1945-52) serving as first chair of the Commission on Human Rights deeply involved in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; author of Courage in a Dangerous World.

October 11, 1913 – Dorothy Woolfolk American writer and editor; one of the first women in the U.S. comic-book industry. She was an editor at Marvel Comics in the 1940s, where she found Superman’s invulnerability boring, so she came up with the fictional metal kryptonite, a fragment of his home planet, which made its first appearance in 1949. She also helped Liz Safian and Mary Skrenes break into the male-dominated field.

October 11,1940 – Lucy Morgan born, American newspaperwoman, and editorialist at the Tampa Bay Times; first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting in 1985, shared with co-author Jack Reed, for their coverage of corruption in the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office in Florida.

October 11,1946 – Elinor Goodman born, British journalist; political editor of ITN’s Channel 4 News (1988-2005); political correspondent for Channel 4 (1982-1988); since her 2005 retirement from journalism, chair of the Affordable Rural Housing Commission of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA).

October 11, 1950 – Patty Murray born, U.S. Senator (D-WA) since 1993; has chaired the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee and Senate Budget Committee; served as Secretary of the Senate Democratic Conference; currently Ranking Member of the Senate Health Committee and Senate Assistant Democratic Leader since 2017.

October 11, 1952 – Paulette Carlson born, American singer-songwriter and guitarist; founder and lead vocalist of Highway 101; in honor of her brother, a Vietnam veteran, she did a series of benefits for Military Veterans in 2005.

October 11, 1957 – Dawn French born, British comedian and writer; best known for co-writing and starring in the BBC comedy sketch show French and Saunders with comedy partner Jennifer Saunders, with whom she won the 1991 Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award for TV-Light Entertainment for French and Saunders.

October 11, 1969 – Merieme Chadid born, Moroccan astronomer, explorer and researcher in Antarctica, leader of international scientific team installing a major astronomical observatory in the heart of Antarctica, first woman astronomer to work in Antarctica; her Ph.D. topic was hypersonic shock waves in pulsating stars.

October 11, 1984 – Dr. Kathryn D. Sullivan becomes 1st U.S. woman astronaut to “walk” in space on Challenger flight.

October 11, 1984 – Jane Zhang born, Chinese singer-songwriter, a leading contemporary Chinese recording artist, dubbed the “Dolphin Princess” for her signature whistle register; noted for her 2008 duet with Andrea Bocelli singing the song, “One World, One Dream.”

October 11, 1988 – First National Coming Out Day held on the one-year anniversary of the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights.

Names-Project-AIDS-Memorial-Quilt-in-Washington-DC-with-Capitol-Building-1987.jpg — AIDS Quilt on the Mall — National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights 1987

October 11, 1991 – Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, law professor Anita Hill accuses Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexually harassing her; Thomas reappears before the panel to denounce the proceedings as a “high-tech lynching.”

October 11, 2011 – The U.N. declares October 11 as the International Day of the Girl Child honoring efforts of the Day of the Girl youth-led movement in the U.S.

Happy-International-Day-Of-The-Girl-Child-I-Am-Girl-Rising.jpg

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Sources

http://www.nwhp.org/events/october/
http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/important-dates-us-womens-history
http://www.historyplace.com/specials/calendar/october.htm
http://www.onthisday.com/day/october/
Women Trailblazers of California: Pioneers to the Present, © 2012 by Gloria G. Harris and Hannah S. Cohen — The History Press
todayinsci.com
A Book of Days for the Literary Year, edited by Neal T. Jones
The Music-Lover’s Birthday Book, Metropolitan Museum of Art
www.sahistory.org.za

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