WOW2 is a four-times-a-month sister blog to This Week in the War on Women. This edition covers trailblazing women and events from April 9 through April 16.
The next WOW2 edition will post
on Saturday, April 16, 2022.
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.
April is Black Women’s History Month
and National Poetry Month
THIS WEEK IN THE WAR ON WOMEN
will post shortly, so be sure to go there next, and
catch up on the latest dispatches from the frontlines.
Many, many thanks to libera nos, intrepid Assistant Editor of WOW2. Any remaining mistakes are either mine, or uncaught computer glitches in transferring the data from his emails to DK5. And much thanks to wow2lib, WOW2’s Librarian Emeritus.
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.
Trailblazing Women and Events in Our History
Note: All images and audios are below the person or event to which they refer
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- April 9, 1634 – Albertine Agnes of Nassau born; after her husband’s death in 1664, she became regent of the Netherlands for her son, Henry Casimir II of Nassau-Dietz, then only 7 years old. In 1665, both England and the bishopric of Münster declared war on the Netherlands. Most of the money for defence had been spent the fleet, while the army had been neglected. When Groningen was under siege, Albertine Agnes quickly went to the city to give moral support. Pressure by King Louis XIV of France, then an ally, forced the forces of her enemies to retreat, but six years later the Netherlands were attacked from the south, by the French under Louis XIV and from the north by the bishop of Münster and the archbishop of Cologne. She organized the defence of the stadtholdership and kept morale high. After her son reached his majority, she retired to a country seat, where she died in 1696.
- April 9, 1827 – Maria Susanna Cummins born, American author; The Lamplighter, her first and best-known book, was a best-seller in 1854. Cummins died at age 39 in 1866.
- April 9, 1860 – Emily Hobhouse born, English reformer and social worker; founder of the Distress Fund for South African Women and Children; notable for her reports which exposed to the British public the appalling conditions in British-run concentration camps for Boer women and children and separate camps for Black noncombatants during and after the Second Boer War. Almost 27,000 Boer women and children, and over 20,000 Black South Africans, died of disease and starvation.
- April 9, 1887 – ** Florence Smith Price born, classical composer, first African-American woman recognized as a symphony composer. Her Symphony in E minor won a Wanamaker Foundation Award, and was performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (1933), the first time an American black woman composer’s work was performed by a major symphony orchestra. She left a large body of work, including compositions for orchestra, pianoforte and organ, chamber music, choral and solo vocal pieces, and arrangements of spirituals.
- April 9, 1921 – ** Mary Jackson born, African American mathematician and aerospace engineer, and she worked for NASA from 1951 until her retirement in 1985. She was NASA’s first black woman engineer, and worked on the behavior of the boundary layer of air around airplanes, but in 1979, frustrated by lack of promotion for women, especially women of color, she took a demotion and became the Federal Women’s Program Manager at Langley. She worked hard for more opportunities the next generation of NASA’s women mathematicians, engineers, and scientists.
- April 9, 1923 – The U.S. Supreme Court in a 5-3 decision ruled in Adkins v. Children’s Hospital that the minimum wage law for women and children in the District of Columbia was unconstitutional. It was effectively overturned by West Coast v. Parrish in 1937, which held that states could impose minimum wage regulations on private employers, as long as they were procedurally fair.
- April 9, 1928 – Mae West opens in the play she wrote for herself, Diamond Lil, her first Broadway success. Some of her previous plays had been shut down because her bawdy sensuality was too racy for the censors.
- April 9, 1929 – Sharan Rani Backliwal born, Indian classical musician and scholar, known for her expertise on the sarod and her collection of over 300 15th to 19th century musical instruments.
- April 9, 1929 – Paule Marshall born Valenza Pauline Burke, American author and poet, best known for her novel Brown Girl, Brownstones; went with Langston Hughes on a State Department-sponsored world cultural tour in 1965.
- April 9, 1933 – Fern Michaels born as Mary Ruth Kuczkir, best-selling American author of thrillers and romantic fiction; noted for her Sisterhood series; founder of the Fern Michaels Foundation, which grants four-year scholarships. She has also helped establish affordable preschool and day care programs for single mothers.
- April 9, 1937 – Valerie Singleton born, English broadcast presenter; she was a continuity announcer for the BBC beginning in 1961, and also worked on several BBC radio programmes; in 1962, she joined Blue Peter, a popular BBCC children’s programme, and was a regular on the show until 1972, then played a part-time role on the show until 1975, while working from 1973 until 1978 on the current affairs programme Nationwide.
- April 9, 1939 – On Easter Sunday, over 75,000 people gather on the Mall in Washington DC to hear famed contralto Marian Anderson give a free concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Anderson had originally been engaged to give a concert at Washington DC’s Constitution Hall, managed by the Daughters of the American Revolution. When the DAR refused to allow a black woman to perform there, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt resigned her DAR membership in protest, and wrote about it in her newspaper column. Thousands more heard Anderson’s concert live in a coast-to-coast radio broadcast, and the story raised awareness of racial discrimination in America.
- April 9, 1946 – Sara Parkin born, Scottish politician, originally with the UK Green Party (1976-1992), a savvy policy instigator and frequent spokesperson for the Green Party, but resigned in 1992 over leadership issues within the party. She co-founded the Forum for the Future, a sustainable development charity, currently involved with spreading sustainability education and literacy.
- April 9, 1946 – Anne-Marie Sahazizian born in Romania, to survivors of the Armenian Genocide; Canadian electrical engineer; longtime active member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the International Council on Large Electric Systems (CIGRE). She was honored with the 2012 IEEE Standards Medallion for “major contributions to the development of standards.” She died at age 73 in September 2019. Her son Anton Sahazizian tells this story: “At my mother’s funeral, a lady I’d never met recounted how my mom had recruited her as a young engineer and mentored her, while another shared that she’d studied many technical articles my mother had written and saw her as a role model for women engineers – two interactions which truly moved me.” It inspired her family to found the Anne-Marie Sahazizian Scholarships to “carry on my mother’s legacy of helping young and particularly female electrical power engineers to develop their professional careers. We believe that’s very much what Mom would have wanted.”
- April 9, 1948 – Jaya Bhaduri Bachchan born, Indian actress and Samajwadi (Socialist Party) politician, member of India’s upper house of Parliament since 2004. In 1992, she was awarded the Padma Shri, India’s fourth highest civilian honor.
- April 9, 1955 – Yamina Benguigui born, French film director and Socialist Party politician of Algerian descent; her father, a leader in the Algerian National Movement, became a political prisoner, but his opposition to her chosen profession led to an estrangement; she is known for films on gender issues in the North African immigrant community in France, including Femmes d'Islam, Mémoires d'immigrés, and l'héritage maghrébin. She was elected to the Paris city council representing the 20th arrondissement in 2008, and appointed as Junior Minister for French Nationals Abroad and Relations with La Francophonie (French-speaking countries worldwide) at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2012; appointed as the French President’s representative for the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (OIF).
- April 9, 1955 – Joolz Denby born as Julianne Mumford, British spoken-word artist, poet, novelist, and tattoo artist; former punk scene bouncer; she organized Poetry in Motion, a local poetry out loud group, and first gained attention as a touring punk performance poet.
- April 9, 1964 – Margaret Peterson Haddix born, American author of over 30 books for children and young adults; noted for her series, The Missing, and Shadow Children.
- April 9, 1966 – Cynthia Nixon born, American stage, film, and television actress, activist, and candidate for public office; best known for the television series, Sex and the City (1998-2004); advocate for LGBT rights, especially same-sex marriage; ran in the 2018 Democratic primaries for Governor of New York, on a platform which addressed income inequality, establishing universal health care, renewable energy, and stopping mass incarceration. She lost to incumbent Andrew Cuomo, getting 34% of the vote to his 66%.
- April 9, 1967 – Natascha Engel born in West Germany, British Labour politican and linguist; first UK Commissioner for Shale Gas (Fracking), appointed in 2018 by the Conservative government; Deputy Chair of Ways and Means (2015-2017); Member of Parliament for North East Derbyshire (2005-2017).
- April 9, 1972 – Siiri Vallner born, Estonian architect; noted for the Museum of Occupations in Tallinn, the sports hall of Lasnamäe, and the central sports hall of Pärnu. Member of the Union of Estonian Architects.
- April 9, 1980 – Sarah Ayton born, English sailor; she won gold medals in the Yngling sailing class in the 2004 and 2008 Summer Olympics, and won the Yngling World Championships in 2007 and 2008. At age 14, in 1995 she battled meningococcal meningitis and septicaemia. Ayton is a patron of Meningitis Now UK, funding medical research and public awareness.
- April 9, 1989 – The March for Women’s Lives, a march initiated by the National Organization for Women, assembles 500,000 women in the nation’s capital to protest anti-abortion law cases pending in the Supreme Court which threaten reversal of the landmark Roe v Wade decision that legalized abortion.
- April 9, 2018 – The daughter of Senator Tammy Duckworth (Democrat-Illinois) was born, making Duckworth the first sitting U.S. senator to give birth while in office. Maile Pearl Bowlsbey is the second child for Duckworth, 50, and her husband, Bryan Bowlsbey. Their first daughter, Abigail, was born in 2014 when Duckworth was serving in the House. Duckworth is one of 10 women who have given birth while serving in Congress; the others were all members of the House. Duckworth, an Iraq war veteran who lost both legs when the Black Hawk helicopter she was piloting was shot down in 2004, said in a statement that motherhood has made her "more committed to doing my job and standing up for hardworking families everywhere."
- April 9, 2020 – Across the U.S., a shortage of PPE (personal protective equipment) put thousands of healthcare workers at risk in the middle of the global pandemic. At a New York hospital, a doctor’s used mask tore as she performed CPR on her infected patient – In Seattle, a nurse compared her intensive care unit to bathing in Covid-19. – In St. Louis, another nurse put her used N95 mask in a paper bag, and prayed it would be disinfected properly. Healthcare workers, exhausted and burned out from the stress of treating a stream of critically ill patients in an increasingly overstretched health care system, question how long they can risk their own health. Some are falling sick, and even dying. In many hospitals, the pandemic upended protocols and precautions that workers previously took for granted. “It’s like walking into Chernobyl without any gear,” said Jacklyn, an ER doctor at a New York City hospital who asked to go by her middle name for fear of being fired over speaking out. At her hospital, 90% of patients have COVID-19, but health care workers get only one N95 mask every five days. “We’re constantly breathing in everything that’s aerosolized because of all of the procedures that we’re doing.”
- April 9, 2021 – UN Women: Members for the new Gender Equality Advisory Council () include journalist Sarah Sands, the council’s chair, and experts including Professor Sarah Gilbert, co-founder of Vaccitech; Dr Fabiola Gianotti, CERN Director-General; and Professor Iris Bohnet, co-director of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School. GEAC was formed to ensure that women are at the heart of the build back better agenda for recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic. Sands said, “The Gender Equality Advisory Council meets at a crucial time for women around the world, as everyone seeks to recover from COVID-19 and seize the opportunity to deliver real change. At the very least, women deserve to be valued, with access to education, to skills, to capital, to trade and to respect. I’m delighted that so many strong leaders have been appointed to the Council, and I look forward to working with them to hold our decision makers to account, ensuring that they are taking meaningful action to overcome the challenges that we all face.”
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- April 10, 1864 – Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, the first woman surgeon of the Union Army (as an unpaid volunteer), after crossing enemy lines to treat the wounded from both armies, is captured by Confederate troops and arrested as a spy. She was working with a Confederate doctor performing an amputation at the time. Sent to the notorious Castle Thunder Prison for political prisoners and spies, the feminist and ardent adherent to rational dress for women, refused to wear the clothes provided as “more becoming of her sex” instead of her work clothes, made over from a man’s shirt and trousers (She often replied to criticism, “I don’t wear men’s clothes, I wear my own clothes.”) Walker was released in a prisoner exchange for a Confederate doctor in August, 1864. After the war, Walker was awarded a disability pension for partial muscular atrophy suffered while she was imprisoned by the enemy, and Generals William Tecumseh Sherman and George Henry Thomas recommended her for the Medal of Honor, which originally was not strictly a military honor. On November 11, 1865, President Andrew Johnson signed the bill awarding her the medal, the only woman ever to receive the Medal of Honor. It was stricken from the rolls in 1917, and she was ordered to surrender it, but she wore it daily until her death in 1919. President Jimmy Carter restored Dr. Walker’s medal posthumously in 1977.
- April 10, 1880 – Frances Perkins born, American sociologist, worker-rights and industrial safety advocate. When President Franklin Roosevelt appointed her as Secretary of Labor (1933-1945), she became the first woman appointed to a U.S. cabinet position. Perkins and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes were the only two Roosevelt cabinet members to remain in office for his entire presidency. She was the point person in 1935 for developing the policies for social security and unemployment insurance, and also helped form government policy for working with labor unions. The U.S. Conciliation Service was developed during her tenure to help mediate between labor and management during strikes. Perkins dealt with many labor questions during WWII, when skilled labor was vital to the economy and women were moving into jobs formerly held by men. Her extraordinary career in public service began in New York state government, where she was one of the first women appointed to the Industrial Commission of the State of New York (1919-1929) by Governor Al Smith, and then newly-elected Governor Franklin Roosevelt appointed Perkins as the inaugural New York state industrial commissioner. She expanded factory investigations, reduced the workweek for women to 48 hours, and championed minimum wage and unemployment insurance laws. She also worked vigorously to end to child labor and for laws to insure safer working conditions, a special issue for her as she had been an eye witness to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, one of the deadliest industrial fires in American history. In 1945, Perkins was appointed by President Truman to serve on the U.S. Civil Service Commission. She spoke against government officials requiring secretaries and stenographers to be physically attractive, blaming the practice for the shortage of secretaries and stenographers in the government. Perkins left the Civil Service Commission in 1952 when her husband died. During all her years of public service, she kept her personal life very private, insisting on using her maiden name, and hiding the fact that her husband was increasingly subject to mental illness, making her the sole bread-winner, raising their daughter much of the time as sole parent, and shouldering a heavy financial burden for her husband’s care in private institutions. After his death, she became an educator and lecturer at Cornell University’s New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations. She died at age 85 in 1965.
- April 10, 1903 – Clare Boothe Luce born, American politician and playwright, U.S. Ambassador to Italy and Brazil; U.S. Congresswoman (Republican-Connecticut, 1943-1947); noted for her play, The Women, which had an all-female cast. Recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1983. In her will, she left a bequest to start the Clare Boothe Luce Foundation, which provides scholarships for women in STEM (specifically excluding those studying for the health professions) at Catholic universities.
- April 10, 1903 – Clare Turlay Newberry born, American children’s book author and illustrator; four of her books were named Caldecott Honor Books: Barkis; Marshmallow; April’s Kittens; and T-Bone the Babysitter.
- April 10, 1910 – Margaret Clapp born, American author, scholar and educator, president of Wellesley College (1949-66), won Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1948 for Forgotten First Citizen: John Bigelow, served as U.S. cultural attaché to India (1968).
- April 10, 1926 – ** Johnnie Tillmon born, director of the National Welfare Rights Organization (1963-1972), worked with Gloria Steinem and Aileen Hernandez on “Women, Welfare and Poverty” at the National Women’s Conference in Houston (1977).
- April 10, 1930 – Dolores Huerta born, American labor, civil rights, and women’s rights activist, co-founder of the United Farm Workers with César Chávez. She was honored with the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In the 1990s, Huerta worked tirelessly for the Feminist Majority’s ‘Feminization of Power’ campaign, encouraging Latinas to run for office, resulting in a significant increase in the number of women running for and winning office at the local, state, and federal levels. Huerta was the first Latina to be inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1993. In 2002, she founded the Dolores Huerta Foundation, to create opportunities for community leadership and grassroots campaigns. She travels across the country engaging in campaigns and influencing legislation that supports equality and defends civil rights, and often speaks to students and organizations about issues of social justice and public policy.
- April 10, 1933 – Helen McElhone born, Scottish politician, Member of Parliament for Glasgow’s Queen’s Park; Vice-Chair of Finance Committee for Strathclyde Regional Council; on Scottish Labour Party Candidate Vetting Panel.
- April 10, 1937 – Bella Akhmadulina born, Russian poet, author, and translator; 1994 Pushkin Prize; Casket and Key, Izbrannoye (Selected Verse).
- April 10, 1940 – Pat Steir born, American painter and printmaker; best known for her ‘Waterfall’ series of splashed, dripping pigment on canvas.
- April 10, 1954 – Anne Lamott born, American novelist, non-fiction writer and progressive political activist/public speaker; Hard Laughter, her first novel was written for her father, writer Kenneth Lamott, after his diagnosis of brain cancer; her non-fiction book, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, inspired the title of Freida Lee Mock’s documentary Bird by Bird with Annie: A Film Portrait of Writer Anne Lamott. She died at age 73 from a heart condition in 2010.
- April 10, 1956 – Dame Carol V. Robinson born, British chemist, noted for research in chemical biology; since 2009, Royal Society Research Professor at the Physical and Theoretical Chemistry Laboratory at Oxford; from 2001 to 2009, Professor of Mass Spectrometry at the Department of Chemistry of Cambridge; has worked on protein folding, the three-dimensional structure of proteins, ribosomes, molecular chaperones and membrane proteins; in 2004, honored with both a Royal Society Fellowship and the Rosalind Franklin Award; in 2010, received the Davy Medal “for her ground-breaking and novel use of mass spectrometry for the characterisation of large protein complexes.”
- April 10, 1957 – Rosemary Hill born, British historian, author, and biographer; best-known for God’s Architect, a biography of Augustus Pugin, which won multiple awards, including the Wolfson History Prize, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; Stonehenge, and Unicorn: The Poetry of Angela Carter, co-author with Angela Carter.
- April 10, 1961 – Carole Goble born, British computer scientist and information systems expert; Professor of Computer Science at the University of Manchester since 1985, and appointed to a chair in 2000. Known for myGrid, BioCatalogue, my Experiment, and Semantic Grid. Co-leader of the Information Management Group with Norman Paton. She is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and of the British Computer Society, and an appointee to the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.
- April 10, 1963 – Doris Leuthard born, Swiss Christian Democratic People’s Party politician; third woman to be elected President of the Swiss Confederation by the Federal Assembly, a position with a one-year term (for 2010 and 2017); Vice President of Switzerland (2016-2017 and 2009); Minister of Environment, Transport, Energy and Communications (2010-2018); Minister of Economic Affairs (2006-2010); fifth woman to be a Member of the Swiss Federal Council (2006-2018).
- April 10, 1974 – Helen Jane Long born, British composer, musician, and pianist, best known for her work on advertising contracts and film projects in a variety of genres, and her contemporary-classic piano albums, Embers and Porcelain.
- April 10, 1977 – Stephanie Sheh born, also uses the alias Jennifer Sekiguchi, American ADR writer, producer, director, and voice actress in Anime, cartoons, video games and films. In 2011, she formed the fundraising organization We Heart Japan in response to the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami.
- April 10, 1979 – Rachel Corrie born, American peace activist and diarist; member of the International Solidarity Movement. In 2003, she was killed in Rafah, in the Gaza Strip, by an Israel Defense Forces armored bulldozer while trying to block the demolition of a Palestinian house. An Israeli investigation of her death concluded the driver of the bulldozer could not see her, so her death was an accident; other members of the International Solidarity Movement who were there say he ran over her deliberately. In 2005, her parents filed a civil lawsuit against the state of Israel, charging Israel with not conducting a full and credible investigation into the case and with responsibility for her death, asking a symbolic one U.S. dollar in damages. An Israeli court rejected their suit in 2012, upholding the findings of the 2003 military investigation. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch were critical of the court’s ruling. Her writings and emails to her parents were published in 2008 as a book, Let Me Stand Alone.
- April 10, 1987 – Hayley Dee Westenra born, New Zealand classical crossover soprano and songwriter. Her first internationally released album, Pure, reached number one on the UK classical charts in 2003 and has sold more than two million copies worldwide, making it one of the fastest selling albums in her country's history. Westenra has sung in English, Māori, Irish, Welsh, Spanish, Italian, German, French, Portuguese, Latin, Japanese, Standard Mandarin Chinese, Catalan, and Taiwanese Hokkien. She a UNICEF Ambassador, and went to Ghana in 2005 to publicise her project, "Bikes for Ghana," and is an active fundraiser for the project, which gives bicycles to Ghanian schoolgirls, allowing them to get to their schools from outlying rural areas.
- April 10, 1996 – President Clinton vetoes HR 1833, the so-called “Partial-Birth” Abortion Ban Act of 1995, which would have outlawed a technique used to end pregnancies in their late stages when there are severe fetal defects, or the life of the mother is at risk.
- April 10, 2001 – Jane Swift sworn in as the first woman acting governor of the state of Massachusetts (2001-2003). She was Lieutenant Governor (1999-2003), when Governor Paul Cellucci was appointed U.S. Ambassador to Canada by President George W. Bush. Swift was pregnant with twins at the time, and became the first sitting governor in U.S. history to give birth when her twin daughters, Lauren and Sarah Hunt, were born one month into her term of office. She made national headlines when she continued to exercise executive authority during her maternity leave, including chairing a meeting of the Massachusetts Governor's Council by teleconference while on bed rest for preterm labor.
- April 10, 2020 – Phyllis Lyon died of natural causes at the age of 95. The feminist and LGBTQ rights pioneer co-founded Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian civil and political rights group in the U.S., with her wife, Del Martin, who died in 2008. They were the first LGBTQ couple to get married in San Francisco.
- April 10, 2020 – Nahla Valji, the UN’s senior gender adviser to the executive office of the secretary general warned, “There is no single society where we’ve achieved equality between men and women, and so this pandemic is being layered on top of existing inequalities, and it’s exacerbating those inequalities.” The current public health emergency will probably mean a disproportionate economic impact for women, who often work in service industries hit hard by Covid-19. They also tend to take on the bulk of unpaid family care at home, a burden that has become even more all-consuming amid physical distancing and self-isolation. Women represent 70% of the global health workforce, but critical resources they need to stay well – reproductive health services, maternal care – may fall by the wayside as the world’s hospitals go into crisis mode. That, in turn, could lead to higher maternal mortality, young pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases, according to a new UN policy brief. Valju added, “Our formal economy is only possible because it’s subsidized by women’s unpaid work.”
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- April 11, 1644 – Marie Jeanne Baptiste of Savoy-Nemours born, Duchess of Savoy by marriage; she served as regent for her son Victor Amadeus II from 1675 to 1680. She was a supporter of construction projects, artistic organizations, and educational institutions, leaving a considerable architectural legacy in Turin. “Madama Reale” was a patron of composer Alessandro Stradella, and Baroque architect Guarino Guarini.
- April 11, 1749 – Adélaïde Labille-Guiard born, French portrait painter and miniaturist. She was an advocate for women to receive the same opportunities as men to become great painters. Labille-Guiard was one of the first women to become a member of the Royal Academy, and the first woman artist to receive permission to set up a studio for her students at the Louvre. She painted portraits of members of the Royal family, which made her a political suspect during the French Revolution. In 1793, she was ordered to destroy some of her royalist works, including the unfinished commission for the Count of Provence. The exile of the Comte of Provence meant Labille-Guiard had not only lost her last royal patron, but she also did not receive a cent of the agreed-upon 30,000 livres. The Revolution further hurt her career when other Royals emigrated without paying for several portraits they had commissioned her to paint. The pastel portraits of the French princesses Marie Adélaïde, Victoire-Louise, and Élisabeth stayed in Labille-Guiard's possession until she died at age 54 from an illness in April, 1803.
- April 11, 1779 – Luise Reichardt born, German composer and choral conductor; her Lieder, written in an accessible style akin to folk music, were popular in Hamburg, Germany, where she lived from 1809 until her death. She established a Gesangverein choral society, but as a woman, she was never allowed to conduct them in public. Through her composing, teaching, and behind-the-scenes conducting, she nevertheless had a strong influence on the musical life of Hamburg.
- April 11, 1864 – Johanna Elberskirchen born, German feminist author and activist for rights of women, gays and lesbians, and blue-collar workers; published books on women’s health and sexuality; her last public appearance was at the 1930 World League for Sexual Reform conference in Vienna; in 1933, the Nazi Party came to power and her activities ended; when she died in 1943, there was no public record of her funeral.
- April 11, 1864 – Lillie Plummer Bliss born, modern art collector and patron. She bequeathed 150 artworks from her collection as the foundation of the in-house collection of the NYC Museum of Modern Art, including works by Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso and Modigliani, and enough funds to maintain the museum’s collection during its critical first years.
- April 11, 1865 – Mary White Ovington born, suffragist, journalist, socialist and civil rights activist. The daughter of Unitarian abolitionists, she became involved in the campaign for civil rights in 1890 after hearing Frederick Douglass speak. Worked on problems of employment and housing in the NY black community through the Brooklyn Greenpoint Settlement and on the Greenwich House Committee on Social Investigations. She was one of the attendees at a meeting in NYC held in response to a race riot in Springfield, Illinois, which issued a call for a national conference on the civil and political rights of black Americans on the centennial of Lincoln's birthday, February 12, 1909, where the National Negro Committee was formed. The committee, at its second conference in 1910, organized a permanent body known as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Ovington was appointed as its first executive secretary.
- April 11, 1881 – The Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary, which becomes Spelman College, is founded in Atlanta, Georgia, by Harriet E. Giles and Sophia B. Packard as institute of higher learning for Black freedwomen. It was renamed Spelman College when it received its collegiate charter in 1924, and is the oldest private historically black liberal arts college for women in the U.S.
- April 11, 1903 – Misuzu Kaneko born, Japanese children’s poet and songwriter; her widowed mother ran a bookstore and insisted on her daughter continuing her education until the age of 17, even though most girls of the time only went to school up to the sixth grade. At the bookstore, Kaneko discovered some magazines for children were soliciting stories and verse, and sent in several of her poems. Five of them were published in 1923. Over the next 5 years, 51 of her poems were published. But her marriage to a clerk in the bookstore was not a happy one. He was unfaithful, contracted venereal disease which he passed on to her, and forced her to stop writing. When she finally divorced him, Japanese law automatically gave indisputable custody of their daughter to the father. She sank into despair. After writing a letter to her former husband begging him to let her mother raise the girl, she committed suicide just before her 27th birthday in 1930. Ultimately, her mother did raise her daughter. Her work fell into obscurity during WWII. In 1966, Setsuo Yazaki, an aspiring poet, found her poem ‘Big Catch’ in an out-of-print book, and spent the next 16 years trying to track down the poet. In 1982, he finally got in touch with Kaneko’s younger brother, who still had the diaries in which his sister had written her poems. The entire collection was published in a six volume anthology. In 2016, an English-language translation of selected poems, Are You an Echo? The Lost Poetry of Misuzu Kaneko, was published.
- April 11, 1905 – Wanting her library to extend its services county-wide, American librarian Mary Lemist Titcomb of the Washington County Free Library in Hagerstown, Maryland, first sends boxes of books to general stores and post offices in small towns to create tiny lending libraries, then adds a Library Wagon (the first U.S. ‘bookmobile’) driven by the library’s janitor, Joshua Thomas, to increase outreach in rural areas.
- April 11, 1908 – ** Jane Bolin born, American lawyer and judge, the first black American woman to graduate from Yale Law School, the first to join the NYC Bar Association and the NYC Law Department, and became the first African-American woman judge in the U.S. when she was appointed to the NYC Domestic Relations Court bench in 1939. For the next 20 years, Bolin was the only black woman judge in the U.S. She was required to retire at age 70 in 1979. She was a legal advisor to the National Council of Negro Women, and served on the boards of the NAACP, the National Urban League, and the Child Welfare League.
- April 11, 1910 – Annie Dodge Wauneka born, first woman elected to the Navajo Tribal Council (1951-1978); she worked on the tuberculosis epidemic, used both Navajo and Bureau of Indian Affairs ideas on prevention of trachoma and influenza, and campaigned for improved sanitary conditions, clean drinking water, against alcoholism. She demanded funding for child health programs. She was the first Native American to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1963).
- April 11, 1913 – The pavilion at Nevill Ground, a cricket venue in Kent, England, is burned down by militant suffragettes, who leave behind suffragette literature to claim responsibility. Nevill Ground was chosen as a target because of their ‘no-admittance to women’ policy.
- April 11, 1914 – Dorothy Lewis Bernstein born, American mathematician whose work centered on applied mathematics, statistics, and computer programming; she also did research on the Laplace transform; first woman to be elected president of the Mathematicals Association of America (1979-1980).
- April 11, 1914 – Sally Hoyt Spofford born, American ornithologist, conservationist, and writer; noted for her work at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology (1955-1969). After retirement, she and her husband, ornithologist Walter Spofford, moved to Portal, Arizona, where their ranch attracted up to 6,000 bird watchers a year.
- April 11, 1916 – Annie Besant established the Home Rule League in India, campaigning for democracy and British Empire dominion status. Besant was a British feminist, women’s rights activist, author, orator, pamphleteer, socialist, and Fabian Society member. A champion of human rights and freedom, she supported home rule for both Ireland and India, campaigned for workers’ rights and safety, and for proper education and better living conditions for the poor.
- April 11, 1925 – Viola Gregg Liuzzo born, American Unitarian Universalist civil rights activist and member of the NAACP, answers the call of Martin Luther King Jr., and goes to Selma, Alabama after Bloody Sunday in 1965, marching from Selma to Montgomery, helping with coordination and logistics. Driving back from taking other activists to the Montgomery airport, she is murdered, shot to death by Ku Klux Klansmen firing from a car that pulled alongside, which was also carrying FBI informant Gary Thomas Rowe. He testifies against the shooters, leading to their conviction. Rowe is given a pass by the FBI for actively participating in violence, sometimes even inciting it, against Civil Rights activists from 1961 until 1965, when he goes into the witness protection program. The FBI launches a smear campaign against Liuzzo after her death, falsely claiming she was a Communist Party member, a heroin addict, and had abandoned her children to have sex with black men in the Civil Rights movement, as part of their attempt to discredit Dr. King and the whole Civil Rights Movement.
- April 11, 1928 – Ethel S. Kennedy born, American human rights campaigner; after the assassination of her husband, Robert Kennedy, she founded the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, a non-profit dedicated to advancing human rights through litigation, advocacy, and education.
- April 11, 1937 – Jill Gascoine born, British novelist, theatrical and television actress; noted for her novels Addicted, Lilian, and Just Like a Woman. In 2013, she announced at a Beverly Hills fundraiser for Alzheimer’s that she had been diagnosed with the disease. Her husband, actor Alfred Molina, reported in 2016 that she was in a very advanced stage of Alzheimer’s, and was in a specialist care home. She died in 2020 at age 83.
- April 11, 1938 – Reatha Clark King born, African-American chemist and corporate executive; Executive Director/Board Chair of the General Mills Foundation (1988-2003); Professor of Chemistry at City University of New York (1968-1977); research chemist for the National Bureau of Standards (1962-1967), the first black woman chemist hired by the agency.
- April 11, 1941 – Ellen Goodman born, American journalist, syndicated columnist, and author; won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary; co-founder and director of The Conversation Project, which helps people talk to their loved ones about what kind of end-of-life care they want before the time when decisions must be made.
- April 11, 1942 – ** Hattie Gossett born, African American feminist playwright, poet, and spoken word artist. She was an early contributor to Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, which was founded by Audre Lorde and Barbara Smith in 1980. Gossett has been an editor on several magazines, including True Story and McCalls. In 2007, she published The Immigrant Suite: Hey xenophobe! Who you calling a foreigner?
- April 11, 1952 – Indira Samarasekera born in Sri Lanka, Canadian mechanical engineer; President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Alberta (2005-2015); member since 2016 of the Canadian Independent Advisory Board for Senate Appointments.
- April 11, 1959 – Ana Maria Polo born in Cuba, American lawyer and arbitrator on Casa Cerrado (Case Closed), broadcast by Telemundo, which became the first Spanish-language program nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award in 2010; a breast cancer survivor, she is a frequent speaker at fundraisers for the cause.
- April 11, 1969 – Cerys Matthews born, Welsh singer-songwriter, author, and broadcaster. She was a founding member of Welsh rock band Catatonia and a leading figure in the "Cool Cymru" movement of the late 1990s. Matthews programmes and hosts a weekly music show on BBC Radio 6 Music, a weekly blues show on BBC Radio 2, and a monthly show on the BBC World Service. She also makes documentaries for television and radio and is a roving reporter for The One Show. She founded 'The Good Life Experience', a festival of culture and the great outdoors in Flintshire in 2014, with Charlie and Caroline Gladstone and is author of Hook, Line and Singer, and children's stories Tales From the Deep and Gelert, A Man's Best Friend.
- April 11, 1979 – Nazanin Afshin-Jam born in Iran; Iranian-Canadian human rights activist, author, and public speaker. During the Iranian revolution, her father was jailed by the Revolutionary Guard. After he was freed from prison, the family fled to Spain, then emigrated to Canada in 1981. Afshin-Jam served with the Red Cross as a Global Youth Educator, involved in campaigns to protect children during war, to break the poverty-disease cycle, against land mines, and to prepare for natural disasters. Afshin-Jam spearheaded a campaign to save Nazanin Mahabad Fatehi, 18-year-old Iranian woman sentenced to hang for stabbing one of three men who tried to rape her and her niece in Karaj in March 2005. Her petition gathered 350,000 signatures worldwide, and helped create international pressure which led to a new trial by the head of Judiciary in June 2006. In January 2007, Nazanin Fatehi was exonerated of murder charges and was released after Afshin-Jam raised $43,000 on-line for bail while her lawyers worked on her case. For her efforts in helping save Nazanin Fatehi, Afshin-Jam was awarded the "hero for human rights award" from Youth For Human Rights International and Artists for Human Rights. The Tale of Two Nazanins by Nazanin Afshin-Jam and Susan McClelland, telling their dramatic story, was published in 2014.
- April 11, 2012 – New polls showed Republican Senator Scott Brown and Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren “running neck-and-neck” in the Massachusetts U.S. Senate race. In one telephone survey, Warren polled at 46 percent and Brown at 45 percent. In November, 2012, Warren would win with 53.7% of the vote, compared to Brown’s 46.2%.
- April 11, 2020 – A report in The Observer, the UK’s oldest Sunday newspaper, on the response by world leaders to the coronavirus crisis shows that Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen of Denmark, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand, and President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan each acted promptly and decisively to limit the pandemic’s effect on their nations. Frederiksen closed Denmark’s borders on March 13, 2020, then closed kindergartens, schools, and universities, and banned gatherings of more than 10 people. Denmark’s death toll as of this date was below 250, and the number of coronavirus patients in Danish hospitals was falling. Her straight-talking speeches and clear instructions to the nation have been widely praised. She posted a clip on Facebook of herself doing the dishes while singing along to 1980s Danish popsters Dodo and the Dodos during the nation’s weekly TV lockdown singalong. Jacinda Ardern had already proved herself an effective and compassionate leader during the Christchurch mosque attacks, and continued her outstanding leadership, putting New Zealand into total lockdown on March 25, speaking with clear, empathetic language in nightly online reports, and urging everyone to “be kind” to one another – a slogan emblazoned on billboards around the country. The island nation had only 4 deaths as of this date. Ing-wen used what her country had learned during the 2003 SARS crisis, and listened to her Vice President, Chen Chien-jen, who is an epidemiologist, so Taiwan began screening travelers from Wuhan in December 2019, and notified the World Health organization of evidence that there was human-to-human transmission of the disease, a warning which WHO did not share with other nations at the time, when it might have been a greater help to global efforts in containing the virus. As of April, 2020, Taiwan had recorded fewer than 400 cases, and just 5 deaths.
- April 11, 2022 – U.S. passport applications as of this date will include a new “X” gender marker, and new Transportation Security Administration scanners will be gender neutral. The official designation of the “X” marker is “unspecified or another gender identity.” President Biden wrote in a proclamation marking Transgender Day of Visibility: “Transgender Americans continue to face discrimination, harassment, and barriers to opportunity. In the past year, hundreds of anti-transgender bills in States were proposed across America, most of them targeting transgender kids. The onslaught has continued this year. These bills are wrong.”
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- April 12, 1883 – Imogen Cunningham born, American photographer; famous for botanical photos, nudes, and industrial landscapes.
- April 12, 1903 – Justine Wise Polier born, lawyer and jurist; in 1925, she enrolled in Yale Law School, where she eventually became editor of the Yale Law Journal. Polier was the first woman in the New York Workmen’s Compensation Division; first woman Domestic Relations Court Judge (1935-1973); she fought against inferior education for black students; daughter of Rabbi Stephen Wise.
- April 12, 1908 – Ida Pollock born, English author of short stories and romance novels, and painter in oils, who was selected for inclusion in a national exhibition in 2004. In a 90 year writing career she sold millions of books, published under ten pseudonyms. Pollack was still writing up to the last year of her life, and lived to be 105 years old.
- April 12, 1910 – Irma Rapuzzi born, French politician; the daughter of a miner, she entered politics in 1947 as a municipal councilor in Marseille, then was elected Senator for Bouches-du- Rhône (1955-1989), served on the Finance Committee (1957-1971), and the Law Commission (1977-1980). She lived to be 107 years old.
- April 12, 1913 – Keiko Fukuda born in Japan, Japanese-American pioneering martial artist, the highest-ranking female judoka in Judo history, holding the rank of 10th dan from USA Judo (2011), and the last surviving student of Kanō Jigorō, the founder of Judo. After completing her formal education in Japan, Fukuda visited the U.S. to teach in the 1950s and 1960s, and eventually settled in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she founded the Soko Joshi Judo Club and continued to teach until her death in 2013.
- April 12, 1916 – Beverly Cleary born, American author, 1981 National Book Award for Children’s Books, for Ramona and Her Mother, and three-time ALA Newbery Medal winner for Ramona and Her Father (1978), Ramona Quimby, Age 8 (1982), and Dear Mr. Henshaw (1984). She died at age 104 in March 2021.
- April 12, 1917– Marietta Tree born as Mary Endicott Peabody, political reporter, liberal Democrat, and human rights activist. In 1941, she was part of the American delegation assisting the British Ministry of Information. She was a U.S. representative on the UN Commission on Human Rights (1961-1964). Mother of historian Frances Fitzgerald and fashion model Penelope Tree. Served as a director on boards of Pan-American Airlines and CBS. Tree had extended love affairs with John Huston and Adlai Stevenson.
- April 12, 1925 – Evelyn Berezin born, American computer designer; noted for designing the first computer-driven word processor, the first computer-controlled system for airline reservations, the first computerized banking system, and a system for range calculations for the U.S Army; 2015 Computer History Museum Fellow Award honoree.
- April 12, 1927 – The British Parliament comes out in favor of women’s voting rights. Women over 30 who met a property qualification had been able to vote since 1918, but parliament now moved toward passing the Equal Franchise Act in 1928, in which women in the UK finally achieved the same voting rights as men.
- April 12, 1933 – Montserrat Caballé born, Spanish bel canto soprano; her “Barcelona” duet with Queen’s Freddie Mercury later becomes the theme song of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.
- April 12, 1943 – Sumitra Mahajan born, Indian Bharatiya Janata Party politician; Speaker of the Lok Sabha (lower house of India’s Parliament) since 2014; Member of Parliament, Lok Sabha, for Indore since 1989; first Indian woman to represent the same Lok Sabha constituency on the same party ticket eight times in a row.
- April 12, 1944 – Lisa Jardine born, British historian; studied both Mathematics and English at university; fluent in eight languages including Ancient Greek and Latin, and wrote on everything from Shakespeare and Francis Bacon to feminist theory and the history of science; Professor of Renaissance Studies at University College, London (1990-2011), also Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Humanities and Director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters; Fellow of the Royal Historical Society; Fellow and Honorary Fellow of King’s College and Jesus College, Cambridge; President of the Antiquarian Horological Society; publications include Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse and Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare. Her book Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory, about how Dutch thinkers and scientists influenced England’s intellectual landscape in the 17th century, won 2009 Cundill International Prize in History.
- April 12,1950 – Joyce Banda born, Malawian politician and grassroots women’s rights activist; Minister of Foreign Affairs (2006-2009); first woman Vice-President of Malawi (2009-2012) founder and leader of the People’s Party in 2011; first woman President of Malawi (2012-2014), taking over after the sudden death of President Bingu wa Mutharika; she was succeeded by his younger brother Peter Mutharika.
- April 12,1957 – Tama Janowitz born, American novelist and short story writer; noted for Slaves of New York, a short story collection, and Scream: A Memoir of Glamour and Dysfunction.
- April 12, 1961 – Magda Szubanski born, Australian actress, comedian, and writer; known for her performances in the Australian TV series Full Frontal (1993-1998), and the 1995 film Babe. She was co-chair of Australian Marriage Equality, and became one of the most prominent leaders of the Australian campaign for same-sex marriage. Her 1995 memoir Reckoning, which included the story of her father, who was an assassin in the Polish Underground during WWII, won the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non Fiction and the Australian Book Industry Biography of the Year award.
- April 12, 1963 – Lydia Cacho born, Mexican investigative journalist, feminist, and human rights activist; her 2004 book, Los Demonios del Edén (The Demons of Eden), alleging that prominent businessmen in Puebla conspired to protect a pedophilia ring, caused a national scandal. After publication, she was arrested in Cancun by Puebla police and driven back to Puebla, 900 miles away, verbally abused and threatened with rape en route, but later released on bail; in 2006, a tape came to light of telephone conversations from shortly before her arrest between the governor of Puebla, Mario Marin, and businessman Kamel Borge about having Cacho beaten and raped to silence her. She took the case of her arrest all the way to the Supreme Court of Mexico, the first woman to testify before the court, but the justices ruled 6-4 in 2007 that there was no case for Governor Marin to answer. In 2008, she was almost killed a few days before the trial of the central figure in the pedophile ring, Jean Succar Kuri, when the lugnuts on one of her car’s wheels were loosened. Kuri was convicted, and sentenced to 112 years in prison. Cacho also reported in 2006 on hundreds of women missing or murdered in Ciudad Juarez. Her book, Infamy: How One Woman Brought an International Sex Trafficking Ring to Justice, was published in 2016. In 2020, Cacho was the host and executive producer of a bilingual podcast about femicide in Juárez. She is the winner of the Civil Courage Prize, the Wallenberg Medal, and the Olof Palme Prize, and named a 2010 World Press Freedom Hero by the International Press Institute.
- April 12, 1965 – Chi Onwurah born, to an English mother and a Nigerian father, UJ Labour politician. Her family moved from Britain to Nigeria shortly after her birth, but in 1967, when the Biafran War broke out, causing famine, her father joined the Biafran army, and the rest of the family returned to the UK. She graduated from Imperial College London in 1987 with a degree in Electrical Engineering, then worked in hardware and software development, product management, market development, and strategy for companies in the UK, France, the U.S., Nigeria, and Denmark while studying for an MBA at Manchester Business School. She was head of Telecoms Technology at the UK Office of Communications (Ofcom), and active in the Anti-Apartheid movement before being elected to Parliament for Newcastle upon Tyne Central in 2010. In February 2014, she spoke in parliamentary debate against gender-specific toys: “Before entering Parliament, I spent two decades as a professional engineer, working across three continents. Regardless of where I was or the size of the company, it was always a predominantly male, or indeed all-male, environment, but it is only when I walk into a toy shop that I feel I am really experiencing gender segregation.” She believes the early limiting of children by gender stereotypes is a serious economic issue, and notes that the proportion of UK women students on engineering degree courses has fallen from 12% to 8% in the thirty years since she was an engineering student herself. In 2020 she was made an Honorary Fellow of the British Science Association.
- April 12, 1979 – Claire Danes born, American film, television and stage actress, winner of 4 Golden Globe Awards, 2 Screen Actors Guild Awards, and 3 Primetime Emmys. Known for the TV series My So-Called Life (1994-1995), and the movies Home for the Holidays, Brokedown Palace, The Hours, Shopgirl, and Stardust. Danes is a feminist, and has been critical of female underrepresentation within Hollywood. She is a supporter of DonorsChoose.org, a website that allows public school teachers to create project funding requests, and Afghan Hands, which helps Afghani women gain independence, education, and livable wages.
- April 12, 2016 – Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality Monument Day – the National Woman’s Party (NWP), founded by Alice Paul, bought the Sewall House in 1929 as their Washington DC headquarters, renaming it the Alva Belmont House in honor of the NWP former president – on this day, U.S. President Barack Obama designates the establishment of the house as the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument, a unit of the National Park System.
- April 12, 2017 – The body of Sheila Abdus-Salaam, the first Muslim woman to serve as a judge in the U.S., was found in the Hudson River, a mile from her Harlem home. Abdus-Salaam was found floating fully clothed near the river’s Manhattan shore. There were no immediate signs of foul play, and sources told the New York Post her death appeared to be a suicide. Abdus-Salaam was a widely respected jurist, and the first African-American woman to serve on New York’s highest court. “She was a conscientious, thoughtful judge who never lost her humility,” said city Corporation Counsel Zachary Carter. “This is an unspeakable tragedy.” By April 18, New York police told reporters that her death was considered “suspicious,” after an autopsy revealed bruises on her neck, but also found water in her lungs, indicating that she was alive when she entered the river. In the end, the Medical Examiner concluded that the death was a suicide.
- April 12, 2020 – U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson ruled that Alabama can't ban abortions under its effort to fight the spread of COVID-19, and issued a temporary injunction sought by the state’s women’s healthcare clinics. Alabama issued an order in late March to postpone all elective medical procedures, except in emergencies, as hospitals braced for a surge in patients infected with the coronavirus. Alabama is one of several Republican-led states, including Ohio and Texas, that tried to block abortions during the crisis on the grounds that they are unnecessary medical procedures. Judge Thompson wrote, “Based on the current record, the defendants' efforts to combat COVID-19 do not outweigh the lasting harm imposed by the denial of an individual's right to terminate her pregnancy, by an undue burden or increase in risk on patients imposed by a delayed procedure, or by the cloud of unwarranted prosecution against providers." In May, 2019, Alabama lawmakers had passed HR 314, the so-called ‘Human Life Protection Act,’ which defines all unborn children as persons, and bans abortions, with only an exception for fetuses with a lethal anomaly, or to save the life of the mother, and no exceptions for rape or incest. It classifies the performance of an illegal abortion as a Class A felony equivalent to rape and murder. Doctors found guilty under its provisions could receive sentences ranging from 10 years to life imprisonment. A federal court ordered the Human Life Protection Act to not be enforced while litigation continues into 2022. In February, 2022, the Alabama state House Judiciary Committee approved a bill by Republican Representative Andrew Sorrell to ban the use of RU486, also called the ‘abortion pill.’
- April 12, 2021 – President Biden nominated Christine Wormuth, who served in the Obama administration as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (2014-2016), to be Secretary of the Army. She had previously been a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, after serving as a civil servant in the Defense Department (1996-2002). She was sworn in on May 28 as the first woman Secretary of the Army, though five women have served as Secretary of the Air Force.
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- April 13, 1519 – Catherine de’ Medici born, the power behind the throne of her three sons, who each became King of France, Francis II, Charles IX, and Henri III; she is often blamed for the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of thousands of Huguenot protestants in 1572, and there is no question she was complicit, having espoused hard-line policies against the Huguenots. Her ruthless policies were aimed at keeping the Valois monarchy on the throne no matter what the cost, and her patronage of the arts was an attempt to glorify a monarchy whose prestige was in steep decline. Without Catherine, it is unlikely that her sons would have remained in power.
- April 13, 1613 – Pocahontas is kidnapped by Samuel Argall, English adventurer and naval officer, and is held captive to force her father, Algonquian chief Powhatan, to release English captives he is holding. Pocahontas is converted to Christianity during her captivity, and remains with the English. In 1614, at age 17, she marries tobacco planter John Rolfe, age 29.
- April 13, 1648 – Jeanne Marie Bouvier de la Motte Guyon born, French mystic and author, accused of heresy and imprisoned (1695-1703) for publishing her book, Moyen court et facile de faire oraison (A Short and Very Easy Method of Prayer) which advocated silent prayer, the intellectual stillness of meditation, over vocal prayer, and was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (the Roman Catholic list of prohibited books, which was finally abolished in 1966 by Pope Paul VI).
- April 13, 1828 – Josephine Butler born, English feminist, social reformer and author; campaigned for women’s suffrage, better education and employment opportunities for women, and against the legal doctrine of coverture, in which a woman’s legal rights and obligations are subsumed by those of her husband, reducing her to his legal appendage – Butler was a key player in the passage of the Married Women’s Property Act 1882; also advocated for an end to sex trafficking of women and children, especially child prostitution, and an end to the Contagious Diseases Acts, which legalized the forced medical examination of prostitutes, but not their clients; founded the International Abolitionist Federation, to fight international sex trafficking and oppose regulations which violated women’s rights.
- April 13, 1854 – ** Lucy Craft Laney born, American educator, founder and principal of Haines Normal and Industrial School, the first school for black children in Augusta, Georgia, beginning with 6 students, but expanding to 234 students by the end of the school’s second year – Laney named the school for Francine Haines, who donated $10,000 for its expansion.
- April 13, 1886 – Ethel Leginska born, British-born concert pianist, composer, conductor, and educator. First woman to conduct some of the world’s leading orchestras. Among her compositions are a four-movement orchestral suite Quatre sujets barbares, inspired by Paul Gauguin paintings, and the operas The Rose and the Ring and Joan of Arc.
- April 13, 1891 – Nella Larsen born, daughter of an Afro-Caribbean father from the Danish West Indies and a Danish immigrant mother, which alienated her from both the white and black cultures of the U.S. In 1915, Larsen got a nursing degree and worked at the Tuskegee Institute’s hospital, NYC’s Lincoln Hospital, and then for the NY Bureau of Public Health. Her 1919 marriage to Elmer Imes, a pioneering black physicist, ended in divorce. In 1923, she became the first black woman to graduate from the New York Public Library School at Columbia University; considered a Harlem Renaissance author, she published her first novel, Quicksand, in 1928, and Passing in 1929; she also published several short stories, but after her divorce in 1933, she was depressed and stopped writing, disappearing from literary circles. When her ex-husband died in 1942, ending his alimony payments, she returned to nursing.
- April 13, 1892 – Clara Mortensen Beyer born, labor lawyer; worked with Frances Perkins and Molly Dewson on the Social Security Act of 1935; campaigned to abolish child labor and to secure minimum wage and maximum hour scales.
- April 13, 1900 – Sorcha Boru born as Claire Jones, American potter and ceramic sculptor, mostly known on the West Coast, where many of her works are held by the Oakland Museum and the Everson Museum of Art; she lived to the age of 105.
- April 13, 1902 – Marguerite Henry born, children’s book author, recipient of the 1949 Newbery Medal for King of the Wind: the story of the Godolphin Arabian, but better-known for her series which began with Misty of Chincoteague.
- April 13, 1909 – Eudora Welty born, author, photographer, won Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1973) for The Optimist's Daughter. Immediately after the murder of Medgar Evers in 1963, Welty wrote a fictional story in the voice of the then-unknown murderer called Where Is the Voice Coming From? Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Literature, and the French Legion d’Honneur.
- April 13, 1916 – Phyllis Fraser born, actress, journalist, author, and publisher. She wrote The ABC and Counting Book, a children's book, and co-founded Beginner Books, the Random House imprint for young children, with Ted Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss.
- April 13, 1919 – Madalyn Murray O’Hair born, American activist and author. She was behind the 1962 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that organized Bible reading in public schools was unconstitutional. The founder and first president of American Atheists; author of Why I Am an Atheist.
- April 13, 1927 – Rosemary Haughton born, Roman Catholic lay theologian and author; noted for The Passionate God; The Tower That Fell; Song in a Strange Land; Tales from Eternity; and The Re-Creation of Eve.
- April 13, 1933 – Ruth Bryan Owen becomes the first woman to represent the U.S. as a foreign minister when she is appointed as envoy to Denmark. She was also Florida’s first Congresswoman (1929-1933).
- April 13, 1940 – Ruby Puryear Hearn born, African-American biophysicist who has worked on development of health improvement programs for at-risk children, maternal and infant care, AIDS prevention, substance abuse, and minority medical education; Senior Vice President of the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation (1983-2001); since retiring, acts as Senior Vice President Emerita.
- April 13, 1944 – Susan Davis born, American Democratic politician, serving in the U.S. House of Representatives, for California’s 49th District (2001- 2003) and then the reconfigured 53rd District (2004-2021); California State Assembly (1994-2001), chair of Committee on Consumer Protection; author of legislation expanding patients’ rights, for state-funded at-home nursing care for seniors, rewards for high-achieving teachers, and funding for after-school programs at public schools, but has a mixed record in the U.S. Congress, voting for expanding government and military rights to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens and others without trial. In 2019, she announced that she would not seek reelection. Democrat Sara Jacobs was elected in 2020 to take her seat.
- April 13, 1945 – Judy Nunn born, Australian author, scriptwriter, and actress. Her novels include The Glitter Game; Centre Stage; Araluen; Beneath the Southern Cross; and Maralinga. She has also written children’s books, and scripts for Australian television and radio programs.
- April 13, 1947 – Rae Armantrout born, American poet; winner of the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award, and the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection, Versed.
- April 13, 1952 – Gabrielle Gourdeau born, French Canadian writer; contributor to the newspapers La Presse, Le Devoir, and Le Soleil, and the cultural magazine Arcade.
- April 13, 1954 – Barbara M. Roche born, British Labour Party Politician; Member of Parliament for Hornsey and Wood Green (1992-2005); Minister of State for Asylum and Immigration, Home Office (1999-2001); Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (2002-2003).
- April 13, 1957 – Amy Goodman born, American broadcast journalist, syndicated columnist, and investigative reporter; host of Democracy Now! since 1996; recipient of the 2004 Thomas Merton Award, and the 2012 Gandhi Peace Award; criminal charges in connection with her television coverage of protests of the Dakota Access pipeline, which showed security personnel using pepper spray and attack dogs on the protesters, were eventually dismissed.
- April 13, 1960 – Lyn Brown born, British Labour politician; Member of Parliament for West Ham since 2005; Newnham London Borough Council member (1988-1992).
- April 13, 1969 – Ha Wen born, Chinese television producer and director; she has worked for China Central Television since 1995.
- April 13, 1980 – Colleen Clinkenbeard born, American ADR director, line producer, voice actress and script writer at Funimation, which does English language versions of Japanese anime series.
- April 13, 1981 – Gemma Doyle born, Scottish Labour Co-operative politician; Member of Parliament for West Dunbartonshire (2010-2015). She is a Trustee of the Foreign Policy Centre, a British think tank founded in 1998, which is pro-European Union.
- April 13, 2015 – Behnaz Shafiei, age 26, is among the first group of female motorcyclists in Iran with official permission to practise on off-road circuits, and she is the one and only Iranian woman rider to have done professional road racing. She feels welcome in an otherwise all-male motorcycling club, where she practises three times a week: “They offer help when I tow my bike with the car or when I run into a technical problem.” Shafiei and a handful of other existing female motocross riders can operate in clubs, they are not allowed to enter competitions or ride on official race tracks, including one at Tehran’s magnificent Azadi sport complex, currently exclusive to men. Aside from this small group, Iranian women are banned from riding a motorbike in public, and are not issued licences, although they are allowed to take part in other sports, from martial arts to car rallies. Shafiei’s story has attracted a great deal of interest in Iran, and she is hopeful that she may be able to compete. She said, “I’ve never seen a bad reaction to what I do. People here are fascinated when they see a woman doing such a physically demanding sport,” she said. “Everyone has something affirmative to say. Women wave hands and say well done, you are brave. There are people who can’t believe a woman can ride a motorbike but they’re generally thrilled and feel very proud.”
- April 13, 2020 – In the contest for a seat on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court, Jill Karofsky, the liberal candidate, beat incumbent conservative Justice Daniel Kelly by over 90,000 votes, a margin of victory that surprised both Democrats and Republicans in a potentially crucial presidential battleground state.
- April 13, 2021 – A federal appeals court upheld a 2017 Ohio law banning abortions when the fetus has Down syndrome. In the 9-7 ruling, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati found that the law did not create an unconstitutional obstacle to abortions. The decision reversed an October 2019 ruling by a divided three-judge 6th Circuit panel that said the law unlawfully blocked some women from getting abortions before the fetus was viable. Another appeals court ruled in January that a similar law in Arkansas was unconstitutional. The conflicting decisions could send the issue to the Supreme Court, where conservatives now hold a 6-3 majority. Arkansas' Republican Attorney General Leslie Rutledge called for the Supreme Court to review the ruling in its case.
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- April 14, 1331 – Jeanne-Marie de Maille born, French noblewoman who wanted to be a nun, but her grandfather insisted she marry. When her grandfather died in the middle of the wedding ceremony, she persuaded her husband, Baron Robert III, not to consummate the marriage so she could dedicate her virginity to God. He was captured during war with the English, and she raised the ransom by selling all of her possessions, but he fled and returned home before the ransom was paid. Robert died from injuries in a later battle in 1352, leaving Jeanne-Marie destitute because her in-laws deprived her of her widow’s inheritance. She began nursing the poor, and after having a vision of Saint Ivasian, became a member of the Third Order of Saint Francis. When a madwoman threw a stone at her, it injured her back, which never fully healed. She died in 1414 at age 82. In 1871, she was beatified by Pope Pius IX.
- April 14, 1819 – Harriet Grannis Arey born, American author, editor, and publisher, who used the pen name Mrs. H. E. G. Arey; she was one of the few girls of her era to study in a co-educational environment. She became a contributor to the Daily Herald in Cleveland, Ohio, then after her marriage moved to Wisconsin, where she was the Preceptress and Teacher of English Literature, French, and Drawing at State Normal School in Whitewater. When she returned to Cleveland, she edited a month publication devoted to charitable work, and was co-founder and first president of the Ohio Woman’s State Press Association. Noted for Household Songs and Other Poems.
- April 14, 1840 – Isabella Stewart Gardner born, American art collector and patron, philanthropist; the founder of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.
- April 14, 1846 – Frances Julia Allis Barnes born, American Quaker temperance advocate and author; she was Secretary (1880-1881) of the Young Women’s Branch of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and then Superintendent (1891-1895) for the World’s Young WCTU work, which increased membership in the U.S. to 30,000 during her tenure. She was a regular contributor to the Oak and Ivy Leaf, the organ of the National Young Women’s Christian Temperance Union.
- April 14, 1866 – Anne Sullivan born. Blinded by trachoma in childhood, she was unable to learn to read or write, and was living in an almshouse in 1880 when she convinced an almshouse inspector to help her enroll in the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston. A series of eye operations partially restored her sight. She graduated from Perkins (1886) as class valedictorian. The following year, she became the teacher of Helen Keller, who was blind, deaf, and unable to speak, and worked and traveled with her the rest of her life.
- April 14, 1886 – Maggie Laubser born, South African painter; her first exhibition in South Africa, after years of study and working in Europe, was met with harsh criticism, but by the 1940s, her work was earning awards; she became a member of the South African Academy for Arts and Science in 1948.
- April 14, 1905 – Elizabeth Paisley Huckaby born, American educator; as Vice Principal for Girls at Little Rock Central High School in 1957 when nine black students, six of them girls, were admitted to the school after desegregation, she was responsible for protecting the girls; in 1958, Governor Orval Faubus closed all the public schools to resist desegregation, and after a year of paying teachers, who were under contract, to sit in empty schools, three members of the Little Rock School Board declared themselves a majority and fired dozens of teachers and administrators, including Huckaby; but the board members were voted out of office, and those who had been fired were reinstated. Author of Crisis at Central High: Little Rock 1957–58, published after her retirement in 1980, based on the diary she kept during the crisis.
- April 14, 1919 – K. Saraswathi Amma born, Malayalam-language feminist writer from the state of Kerala in India, whose short stories, essays, and a novel were radically anti-patriarchy, so she was dismissed in her time as “an incorrigible man-hater” but has since been re-discovered and celebrated by feminist scholars.
- April 14, 1919 – Shamshad Begum born, Indian singer, one of the first playback singers in the Hindi film industry; she sang in a number of languages including Hindi, Tamil, and Punjabi.
- April 14, 1924 – Helen W. Warnock born, the Baroness Warnock, English philosopher and author who has written extensively on ethics and existentialism; Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge (1984-1991); chair of a 1974 UK inquiry on special education, which resulted on a radical change to placing learning-disabled children in mainstream school, and giving them additional educational support; President of Listening Books, a charity providing audiobooks to people who have difficulty reading.
- April 14, 1926 – Barbara R. Anderson born, Lady Anderson, a New Zealand medical technologist and teacher who first became a published novelist in her sixties; noted for The House Guest; Proud Garments; and The Swing Around. She died in 2013 at age 86.
- April 14, 1932 – Loretta Lynn born, American singer-songwriter; 7 American Music Awards, 12 Academy of Country Music awards and 4 Grammys.
- April 14, 1949 – Dame Deanne Julius born, American- British economist and analyst, formerly for the CIA; founding member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee; current Lady Usher of the Blue Rod of the Most Distinguished Order of Saint Michael and Saint George since 2016.
- April 14, 1949 – Julie Christie born, British actress and film star; she won the 1964 Academy Award for Best Actress for Darling. She is active in animal rights, environmental protection, and the anti-nuclear power movement, and is also a Patron of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, and of the charity and self-help group Action for ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis, more commonly called chronic fatigue syndrome).
- April 14, 1954 – Sue Hill born, English healthcare scientist and specialist in respiratory medicine, PhD in pulmonary pathophysiology, Dame of the British Empire (2018), and Chief Scientific Officer for England since 2002; worked on initiatives for the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), including leading the development of UK National Occupational Standards for healthcare science. She is Vice-President of the British Lung Foundation, and co-founder with Robert Stockley of the biennial COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) international conference.
- April 14, 1960 – Tina Rosenberg born, American journalist and non-fiction author; New York Times writer and columnist, and frequent contributor to The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and The New Republic; co-founder with David Bornstein and Courtney Martin of the Solutions Journalism Network in 2013. Her book, The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism, won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and the 1995 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
- April 14, 1981 – Amy Leach born, British theatre director; co-founder of the En Masse theatre company; her productions of The Echo Chamber and The Ignatius Trail won Fringe First Awards at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2003 and 2004.
- April 14, 2014 – The Jihadist terrorist group Boko Haram abducted 276 schoolgirls from Chibok, Nigeria; some have since escaped, been rescued, or freed. As of 2017, more than 100 girls remain in Boko Haram custody, and negotiations with the terror group continue, the government said.
- April 14, 2014 – Donna Tartt’s best-selling novel, The Goldfinch, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; Annie Baker’s play, The Flick, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama; and Megan Marshall’s Margaret Fuller: A New American Life won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography.
- April 14, 2019 – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Democrat-California) issued a statement after President Trump tweeted an inflammatory video against Representative Ilhan Omar (Democrat-Minnesota) that she had ordered Capitol Police to conduct “a security assessment to safeguard” Omar, her family, and staff. In the edited video, Omar is superimposed over scenes of the September 11 terrorist attacks; Trump added the caption, “We will never forget.” In a speech last month, Omar, one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress, said the Council on American-Islamic Relations was founded “because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.” Conservatives jumped on the remarks, accusing Omar of trivializing the attacks.
- April 14, 2020 – Poland’s parliament met to discuss a controversial proposal to tighten the nation’s abortion laws even more. Dozens of women protested in central Warsaw, in cars and on bicycles, honking horns and displaying posters against the proposed legislation. Police used megaphones to warn protesters they risked fines for breaking lockdown regulations. Poland, with a population that is over 92% Roman Catholic, already had some of the strictest abortion laws in Europe. Attempts to tighten the laws further in 2016 were abandoned after mass protests. But during a global pandemic, huge street protests are not a possibility, and women’s rights groups rightly feared the conservative government would take advantage of the situation. “For them, this is the best time to pay the debts they have to ultra-conservative groups,” said Barbara Nowacka, an opposition MP active in the protests in 2016. “We are really afraid that they will use the fact that citizens of Poland are focused on their future and health right now, and not on values, sexual education, women rights.” Nowacka was attacked by having fuel thrown in her face during protests against the new law when it was passed in November 2020. In January 2021, the near-total ban on abortions, even in cases of fetal defects, went into effect, sparking more nation-wide protests in defiance of Poland’s Covid-19 restrictions on gatherings.
- April 14, 2021 – According to the annual state of world population report issued by the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), 20 countries still allow rapists to escape criminal prosecution by marrying their victims. Russia, Thailand, and Venezuela are among the countries that allow men to have rape convictions overturned if they marry the women or girls they have assaulted. Dr. Natalia Kanem, executive director of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), said such laws were “deeply wrong” and were “a way of subjugating women. The denial of rights cannot be shielded in law. ‘Marry your rapist’ laws shift the burden of guilt on to the victim and try to sanitise a situation which is criminal.” Dima Dabbous, director of Equality Now’s Middle East and Africa region, whose research is cited in the UNFPA report, said the laws reflected a culture “that does not think women should have bodily autonomy and that they are the property of the family. It’s a tribal and antiquated approach to sexuality and honour mixed together.” Dabbous added that it is “very difficult to change [these laws] but it’s not impossible”. She said the law in Morocco was repealed following widespread outrage when a young woman killed herself after she was forced to marry her rapist. Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon, and Tunisia followed suit. However, Kuwait still allows a perpetrator to legally marry his victim with the permission of her guardian. In Russia, if the perpetrator has reached 18 and has committed statutory rape with a minor below 16, he is exempt from punishment if he marries the victim. In Thailand, marriage can be considered a settlement for rape if the perpetrator is over 18 and the victim is over 15, if she “consented” to the offence and if the court grants permission for marriage. Marriage laws and practices that subordinate women are widespread and difficult to root out, said the UNFPA, which reported that 43 countries have no legislation criminalising marital rape. The report, which focuses on bodily autonomy – the ability to make choices about your body free from violence or coercion – highlighted that nearly half of women (45%) in 57 countries are denied the right to say yes or no to sex with their partner, use contraception, or seek healthcare.
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- April 15, 1558 – Roxelana, Hurrem Sultan, died. Born in Ruthenia (an eastern region of the Kingdom of Poland, which is now Ukraine), she was captured by Crimean Tatars during a slave raid and eventually taken to Istanbul, the Ottoman capital. She entered the Imperial Harem, was renamed Hurrem, then rose through the ranks to become the favourite of Sultan Suleiman. Breaking Ottoman tradition, he freed and then married Hurrem, making her his legal wife; sultans had previously married only foreign free noble ladies. She was the first imperial consort to receive the title Haseki Sultan. Hurrem remained in the sultan's court for the rest of her life, having six children with him, including the future sultan, Selim II. She was a trusted advisor to the Sultan, and influenced affairs of state, writing diplomatic letters to King Sigismund II Augustus of Poland. Two of her letters to the King of Poland have survived, and during her lifetime the Ottoman Empire generally had peaceful relations with the Polish state within a Polish–Ottoman alliance. She also patronized major public works. Hurrem Sultan died in 1558, and was entombed in a mausoleum within the Süleymaniye Mosque complex.
- April 15, 1829 – Mary Harris Thompson born, founder and head physician of the Chicago Hospital for Women and Children, one of the first women to practice medicine in Illinois.
- April 15, 1841 – Mary Grant Roberts born, Australian zoo owner. She and her husband opened the Beaumaris Zoo in 1895 (it became the Hobart Zoo in the 1920s). Roberts was the first person to successfully breed Tasmanian Tigers, but they became extinct when the last one died in the Hobart Zoo in 1936. She founded the Game Preservation Society and the Anti-Plumage League, and successfully campaigned with the Royal Society of Tasmania to strengthen Tasmania's laws on animal welfare. She died in 1921, leaving the zoo to the trustees of the Royal Society of Tasmania Museum, who passed it to Hobart City Council. The zoo was closed in 1937 because of increasing maintenance costs, and a fall-off in the number of visitors.
- April 15, 1892 – Corrie ten Boom born, Dutch watchmaker; after the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands, she and her family began helping Jews escape the Nazi holocaust, starting with their neighbors; betrayed in 1944 by a Dutch informant, the family was arrested and sent to prison, but the six people in hiding at their house were undiscovered, and managed to escape undetected; many of her family members died in prison, but she survived, and wrote the best-selling book The Hiding Place, helped set up refugee housing for holocaust survivors, and became a public speaker. The Yad Vashem Remembrance Authority named her Righteous Among the Nations in 1967.
- April 15, 1894 – Bessie Smith born, notable American blues singer; learned country blues from Gertrude “Ma” Rainey; she made 160 recordings, and was dubbed “Empress of the Blues.”
- April 15, 1895 – Abigaíl Mejía Soliére born, Dominican Republic teacher, pioneering feminist activist and nationalist; co-founder with Delia Weber of the Acción Feminista movement in 1927 to gain educational opportunities for poor Dominican women, campaign for women’s suffrage (achieved in 1942), and work for social issues such as penal reform, and against drug and alcohol abuse and forced prostitution.
- April 15, 1896 – ** May Edward Chinn born, first black woman to graduate from Bellevue Hospital Medical College (1926), first African-American woman to intern at Harlem Hospital, and the first woman doctor in Harlem (1936-1977). In 1944, she also began working with George Papanicolau on the Pap smear to identify cervical cancer (1944-1973). She died at age 84 in 1980. Author Kuwana Haulsey wrote Angel of Harlem, a novel based on her life, published in 2004.
- April 15, 1915 – Elizabeth Catlett born, black American sculptor and illustrator; known for her portraits of sharecroppers.
- April 15, 1916 – Helene Hanff born, American author and screenwriter; best known for her book 84, Charing Cross Road.
- April 15, 1928 – Norma Merrick Sklarek born, American architect, first African American female architect licensed in New York and California, first to be elected Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, first to form her own architectural firm.
- April 15, 1930 – Vigdís Finnbogadóttir born, world’s first democratically elected and longest-serving woman president, fourth President of Iceland (1980-1996).
- April 15, 1943 – P1nar Kür born, Turkish author and dramatist; she also teaches at Bilgo University in Istanbul.
- April 15, 1943 – Veronica Linklater born, Baroness Linklater of Butterstone; Liberal Democrat member of the House of Lords, advocate for children’s welfare and prison reform.
- April 15, 1947 – Linda Bloodworth-Thomason born, American screenwriter and television producer; co-founder of Mozark Productions; notable for creating, writing, and producing the hit series Designing Women (1986-1993); produced and directed campaign films for both Bill and Hillary Clinton.
- April 15, 1947 – Cristina Husmark Pehrsson born, Swedish Moderate Party politician, member of the Riksdag (1998-2014); Minister for Social Security and for Nordic Cooperation (2006-2010).
- April 15, 1951 – Heloise born as Ponce Heloise Evans, American newspaper columnist and radio show host; took over “Hints from Heloise” from her mother, Heloise Bowles, in 1977; also contributing editor/columnist for Good Housekeeping, and author of almost a dozen books.
- April 15, 1951 – Marsha Ivins born, American aerospace engineer and NASA Astronaut, a veteran of five space shuttle missions.
- April 15, 1952 – Avital Ronell born in Czechoslovakia, American philosopher and academic whose work explores a wide range, spanning literary studies, feminist philosophy, psychoanalysis, addiction, ethics and legal issues, trauma, war and technology; a founding editor of the journal Qui Parle.
- April 15, 1959 – Emma Thompson born, British actor, author, screenwriter; nominated for five Academy Awards, and won Best Actress for Howard’s End and Best Adapted Screenplay for Sense and Sensibility; human rights and environmental activist, who has traveled in Africa as an ambassador for the charity Action Aid, and is chair of the Helen Bamber Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, and a patron of the Refugee Council.
- April 15, 1960 – Ella Baker leads a conference at Shaw University in North Carolina where SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee is founded, a principal organization of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.
- April 15, 1960 – Susanne Bier born, Danish film director; best known for her feature films Brothers, After the Wedding, In a Better World, and Bird Box, and the British television series, The Night Manager.
- April 15, 1961 – Carol W. Greider born, American molecular biologist; Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, Daniel Nathans Professor, and Director of Molecular Biology and Genetics at Johns Hopkins University. Greider discovered the enzyme telomerase in 1984. Awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize, with Elizabeth Blackburn and Jack W. Szostak, for their discovery that telomeres (the caps at the end of each strand of DNA that protect our chromosomes) are protected from progressive shortening through wear by the enzyme telomerase.
- April 15, 1961 – Dawn J. Wright born, American geographer and oceanographer, a leading authority in the application of geographic information system (GIS) technology to the field of ocean and coastal science, and played a key role in creating the first GIS data model for the oceans. Wright is Chief Scientist of the Environmental Systems Research Institute (aka Esri); professor of geography and oceanography at Oregon State University since 1995. First African American woman to dive to the ocean floor in the deep submersible ALVIN.
- April 15, 1962 – Nawal El Moutawakel born, Moroccan politician and Olympian; Moroccan Minister of Sports (2007-2009); Secretary for Youth and Sport (1997-1998); won the inaugural women’s 400 metres hurdles at the 1984 Summer Olympics, becoming the first Muslim woman born on the continent of Africa to be an Olympic champion, and the first Moroccan to win an Olympic gold medal. Founding member and president of the Moroccan Sport and Development Association since 2002.
- April 15, 1969 – Kaisa Roose born, Estonian conductor and pianist; noted for conducting all of the Danish regional orchestras, and orchestras in Sweden, Finland, Italy, and Costa Rica.
- April 15, 1972 – Katharine Scott Hayhoe born, Canadian atmospheric scientist and professor of political science who is the director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University, and CEO of the consulting firm ATMOS Research and Consulting. In 2021, Hayhoe joined the Nature Conservancy as the organization’s Chief Scientist. Her thesis was on a modeling study of the role of methane in global climate change. The daughter of evangelical Christian missionaries, she credits her father, who was a science and technology coordinator for the Toronto District School Board, for fostering her belief that science and religion do not have to conflict with each other.
- April 15, 1975 – Sarah Teichmann born, German biophysicist and immunologist; Head of Cellular Genetics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute; visiting research group leader at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI); a Director of Research (equivalent to Professor) in the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, and a Senior Research Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge. Noted for her studies of gene expression, protein complex assembly, patterns in protein interactions, and transcriptional regulatory networks. Teichmann has received a number of awards, including the 2010 Colworth Medal from the Biochemical Society, and in 2012, the Francis Crick Medal and Lecture, membership in the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), and the Lister Prize from the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine. In 2015, she won the Michael and Kate Bárány Award, presented by the Biophysical Society, and was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences.
- April 15, 2018 – Michael Cohen, Donald Trump's personal attorney, used the same Delaware shell company to pay hush money in two separate Republican scandals, according to The Wall Street Journal. Cohen used the company, Essential Consultants, to pay $130,000 to porn star Stormy Daniels for her silence on her alleged affair with President Trump more than a decade ago. The Journal reported Cohen also used it to pay Shera Bechard, former Playboy model, $1.6 million for her silence about her claim that Republican fundraiser Elliott Broidy got her pregnant. Trump's lawyers asked a federal judge to let Trump review the seized documents before federal investigators do. Cohen's lawyers argued that many of the seized documents are covered by attorney-client privilege, but Cohen pled guilty to five counts.
- April 15, 2020 – After the government in the UK banned weddings in March, 2020, to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus, many couples found themselves in immigration limbo. The wedding of Dr. Dawn Liu and Dr. Angus Holford, both academics at the University of Essex, was supposed to take place on April 6, 2020. Lui is from Singapore, and is on a Tier 2 working visa. Under normal circumstances, she would have had plenty of time after their April wedding to apply for a spouse visa before her Tier 2 visa expired on July 14, 2020. But with the wedding postponed indefinitely, Liu and Holford became one of a number of couples wondering what will happen to their plans. Under existing immigration law, Liu could still apply to switch her tier 2 working visa to a spouse visa, allowing her to remain legally in the UK. However, engaged people cannot work on spouse visas – meaning that Liu would have to quit her job if she wanted to remain in the UK with Holford. Although the government has automatically extended all visas that were set to expire during the lockdown to May 31, this didn’t help Liu. “It’s a circular legal nightmare for us,” says Holford. “The government has been vague in their promises,” says immigration specialist Robin Molyneux of Global Immigration Solutions. “They should look at having a provision for anyone whose visa was expiring by a later date being automatically extended, without fees being payable for people having to renew them.” The fee to apply for an extension is £1,033 (about $1,425 USD). Fortunately, the UK ban on weddings was lifted, effective July 4, 2020, allowing Dawn Lui and Angus Holford to get married in the nick of time.
- April 15, 2021 – First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon and her Scottish National Party have committed to a £2.5bn boost to frontline NHS spending, a freeze on income tax throughout the next parliament, and the abolition of National Health Service (NHS) dentistry charges, in what Nicola Sturgeon described as an “unashamedly optimistic” manifesto while warning that the outcome of the next month’s Holyrood election was “on a knife-edge.” The SNP’s manifesto also called for a second referendum on Scottish independence, as soon as the Covid-19 crisis is over. Sturgeon said it would be “a dereliction of my duty as first minister” to hold a referendum while the pandemic was ongoing, but added: “It would also be a dereliction … to let Westminster take Scotland so far in the wrong direction that we no longer have the option to change course ... After this election, if there is a simple, democratic majority in the Scottish parliament for an independence referendum, there will be no democratic, electoral or moral justification whatsoever for Boris Johnson or anyone else to block the right of people in Scotland to decide their own future.”
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- April 16, 1693 – Mary Alexander born, American colonial merchant, successful and influential; she married twice and had ten children; her fortune was estimated at 100,000 pounds in 1743.
- April 16, 1755 – Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun born, French painter, major 18th century woman painter; portrait painter to Marie Antoinette.
- April 16, 1811 – Wilhelmine Reichard becomes the first German woman to fly a balloon solo. Starting in Berlin, she reached a height of over 5,000 metres (16,000 ft) and landed safely in Genshagen, 33.5 kilometres (20.8 mi) from her starting point. This was not the first solo flight by a woman in Germany; the Frenchwoman Sophie Blanchard had made a flight in September 1810, starting from Frankfurt. Reichard’s third flight in 1811 reached a height of approximately 7,800 metres (25,600 ft). Due to the altitude she lost consciousness and her balloon crash-landed in a forest; badly injured, she was rescued by local farmers.
- April 16, 1848 – Kandukuri Veeresalingam Pantulu born, Indian social reformer and author; he campaigned for women’s education, the remarriage of widows, an end to the dowry system, and edited Satihita bodhini, a monthly magazine for women. In spite of opposition which sometimes became violent, he continued his advocacy of education for women, and the right of widows to remarry. Pantulu started a Remarriage Association which served as a match-maker for widows, and established a home for elderly widows.
- April 16, 1864 – Rose Talbot Bullard born, American physician and medical school professor. Bullard earned her medical degree at the Women’s Hospital Medical College in Chicago, where she graduated at the top of her class in 1886. Her sister Lula Talbot Ellis was also a physician, and the first woman to graduate from the medical school at the University of Southern California in 1888. She shared a medical practice with Elizabeth Follansbee. In her work with women patients, Bullard advocated outdoor activity, especially bicycling, which she believed came with other benefits for women. “The bicycle has done more for the cause of legitimate dress reform than any other single agent,” she declared in 1895. She taught gynecology at the University of Southern California, and was one of the first officers of the YWCA of Los Angeles, when it formed in 1893. Bullard was the first woman elected as president of the Los Angeles County Medical Association in 1902 (and there wasn’t another woman president of the association until 1992). She was also a fellow of the American College of Surgeons, one of only eight women elected to that status when it was founded in 1912. In her obstetric practice, she was among the first in Southern California to use spinal anesthesia. When the American Medical Association established a Public Health Education Committee in 1909, Bullard was one of the ten physicians appointed to the committee, and the only one from Los Angeles. The Women Physicians Action Committee of the Los Angeles County Medical Association gives an annual Rose Talbot Bullard Award for a woman physician who is a “champion and trailblazer.”
- April 16, 1890 – Gertrude Chandler Warner born, author, best known for her series Boxcar Children; she was also an elementary school teacher (1918-1950), and a volunteer for the American Red Cross.
- April 16, 1891 – Dorothy Pulis Lathrop born, American illustrator and author of children’s books; illustrated Hitty, Her First Hundred Years, by Rachel Field, which won the 1930 Newbery Medal.
- April 16, 1893 – Germaine Guèvremont born, Canadian writer, notable figure in Quebec literature; En plein terre, Le Survenant, and Marie-Didace.
- April 16, 1912 – Harriet Quimby becomes the first woman to fly an airplane across the English Channel.
- April 16, 1921 – ** Marie Maynard Daly born, American biochemist who was the first African-American woman to receive a Ph.D. in Chemistry (1947). Her postdoctoral research at the Rockefeller Institute included studying the composition and metabolism of components of cell nuclei, determining the base composition of deoxypentose nucleic acids, and calculating the rate of uptake of labeled glycine by components of cell nuclei. Seven years later, she took a university position. She taught biochemistry and researched the metabolism of the arterial wall and its relationship to aging, hypertension, and atherosclerosis. Later, she studied the uptake, synthesis, and distribution of creatine in cell cultures and tissues. She retired in 1986.
- April 16, 1933 – Baroness Joan Bakewell born, English television journalist-presenter playwright, author, and humanist; President of Birkbeck, University of London; The Centre of the Bed is her autobiography.
- April 16, 1935 – Sarah Kirsch born as Ingrid Kirsch, but changed her given name to Sarah in protest against her father’s anti-Semitism; German poet and author.
- April 16, 1940 – Margrethe II of Denmark born, Queen of Denmark since 1972; she became the heir presumptive in 1953, when an amendment was made to the Danish constitution to include female succession if there is no male heir; she is the first woman ruler of Denmark since Margrethe I (1375-1412). She has a passion for archaeology, and has participated in several excavations in Eturia, Italy, Egypt, Denmark, and South America.
- April 16, 1940 – Joan Snyder born, American abstract narrative painter; in 1971, she founded the Women Artists Series at the Mabel Smith Douglass Library of Rutgers University, the oldest continuous running exhibition space in the U.S. “dedicated to making visible the work of emerging and established contemporary women artists.” In 1987, the series was renamed the Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series.
- April 16, 1946 – Margot Adler born, American writer, lecturer, and New York correspondent for National Public Radio; noted author of books on Neopaganism: Drawing Down the Moon, and Heretic’s Heart: A Journey Through Spirit and Revolution.
- April 16, 1957 – Patricia De Martelaere born in Belgium, Flemish philosopher, academic, novelist and essayist; wrote her first book at age 14, King of the Jungle; her first adult novel was Nachtboek van een slapeloze (Night Book of an Insomniac); in non-fiction, she wrote Het onverwachte antwoord (The Unexpected Answer); De Martelaere died of complications from a brain tumor in 2009.
- April 16, 1961 – Linda Ruth Williams born, British Professor of Film Studies in the College of Humanities at the University of Exeter. Her special interests include sexuality and censorship in cinema and literature.
- April 16, 1972 – Tracy K. Smith born, American poet; Poet Laureate of the United States (2017-2019); recipient of the 2002 Cave Canem Prize, the 2006 James Laughlin Prize, and the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Life on Mars. Her next collection, Ordinary Light, was shortlisted for a National Book Award. Smith has also contributed to numerous anthologies.
- April 16, 1975 – Joanna Ławrynowicz born, Polish classical pianist, often featured as a soloist, or playing in chamber music groups. She has also recorded over 30 albums, including a complete set of the works of Chopin. Since 1998, she has been an assistant professor at the Piano Department of the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music in Warsaw.
- April 16, 2002 – U.N. Secretary-General names primatologist Jane Goodall as a United Nations Messenger of Peace.
- April 16, 2014 – The Supreme Court of India recognizes transgender as a “third gender” in a landmark ruling.
- April 16, 2016 – The U.S. army approves requests by 22 soldiers to become the first American women infantry and armor unit officers, 13 in the armor branch, and nine as second lieutenants in the infantry.
- April 16, 2018 – New York Times writers Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey and The New Yorker's Ronan Farrow shared the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in recognition of their reporting on allegations of sexual assault and harassment of women by movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. The scandal touched off the larger #MeToo and Time's Up movements. The Washington Post was also honored, for staff coverage of sexual misconduct allegations against then-Senate candidate Roy Moore in Alabama.
- April 16, 2020 –UN Women took notice that in Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, New Zealand, Norway, and Taiwan, women leaders acted early and decisively to limit the spread of the coronavirus. Yet in January, 2020, less than 7% of elected heads of state in the world were women – just 10 out of 153 – while men made up 75% of parliamentarians, 73% of managerial decision-makers, and 76% of people in mainstream news media. "We have created a world where women are squeezed into just 25% – one quarter – of the space, both in physical decision-making rooms, and in the stories that we tell about our lives. One quarter is not enough," said UN Women Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka. Increasing the number of women in positions of power is dependent on some form of proportional representation voting system to elect lawmakers and leaders in tandem with intentional recruitment strategies, to get more women elected, and normalize women in positions of power. Research by the RepresentWomen advocacy group confirms that voting systems have a big impact on the number of women elected to office. As of January, 2021, the U.S. ranked 67th in the world for the number of women representatives in our lower house, even though the 118 women, out of 435 representatives, reflected a new record high for the U.S. – about 27% of the House. In the U.S. Senate, from January 3, 2021, to January 19, 2021, 26 of its 100 members were women, another record high, but since January 20, 2021, the number is down to 24 women.
- April 16, 2021 – Pregnant women in the UK were given the green light to receive either the Pfizer or Moderna Covid vaccine based on their age and clinical risk group after real-world data from the U.S. showed about 90,000 pregnant women had been vaccinated without any safety concerns, the UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) said. Pregnant women, who had previously been advised not to take the vaccine because of a lack of data on the impact, will be able to have it at any stage. About 700,000 women give birth in England and Wales each year. The new guidance states that women who are trying to get pregnant, recently had a baby or are breastfeeding can be vaccinated with any jab, depending on their age and clinical risk group.
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It Takes a Village to Raise a Chick: Superb Starling
Flocks Are Cooperative in Raising Their Young
Superb Starlings are commonly found in savannah woodland, or scrub thorn areas of Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, and Tanzania, usually in small flocks. They are swift and maneuverable fliers, and forage during daylight hours for insects, berries, fruit, and seeds. Superb Starlings are gregarious birds that form kin-based flocks of up to 40 or more individuals that defend a territory year-round.
Reproductive behavior in Superb Starlings is complicated because they are cooperative breeders, meaning that some members of the flock are not breeders, but they help with raising and protecting the young. Breeding season is primarily from March until June during the rainy season but there is sometimes a secondary breeding season from October to November during the short rains.
Pair-bonds typically endure from season to season, though mate-switching and extra-pair mating does occur. Breeding pairs make nests of grass, woven into a dome-like structure with a tunnel entrance, and lined with feathers.
Two to five dark blue-green eggs are laid at a time. After 13-15 days of incubation, the young hatch. Chicks receive alloparental care, meaning that both parents and additional members of the group help care for the chicks. The helpers and the breeding male often provide most of the care for the chick, while the breeding females are often first to defend the nests from predators.
Both genders of Superb Starlings have colorful plumage, as do males and females in most cooperative breeding species of birds.