March 24
1972: U.S Congress passes the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972.
1985: the National Association of Attorney Generals (of the various states) called for the U.S. Justice department to investigate abortion clinic bombings and terrorism as violations of the Federal Civil Rights laws. The Republican administration ignored the request.
March 23
1977: Lucy Wilson Benson is appointed Under Secretary of State for Security Assitance, Science, and Technology. Benson was president of the League of Women Voters of the United States from 1968-1974, and was the first woman to give a commencement speech at the University of Maryland (in 1972).
March 22
1893: (A First) Senda Berenson Abbott organizes the first collegiate women’s basketball game at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, with freshmen playing against sophmores.
March 20
1852: The first edition in book form of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin is published.
1991: in an unusual 9-0 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Automobile Workers v. Johnson Controls that excluding women from jobs in which toxic substances exposure could injure a fetus was unconstitutional. (Medical tests show that men’s sperm is extremely fragile and more likely to be deformed by chemical exposure.)
March 19
1881: (Birthday) Edith Nourse Rogers, U.S. Representative from Massachusetts born in Saco, York County, Maine. Rogers was elected to the House of Representatives in 1925. She served in Congress longer than any other woman and was the first woman to have her name attached to a piece of major legislation. In Congress she fought for an end to child labour, the 48 hour week and equal pay for women. During the Second World War Rogers introduced legislation to establish the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC). After the war, Rogers was a leading advocate of the G.I. Bill of Rights, which gave returning veterans the opportunity to go to college and to receive low-interest loans to buy houses.
1917: (A First) The U.S. Navy authorizes enlistment of women during World War I.
1975: By unanimous decision the U.S. Supreme Court invalidates a Social Security law which gave survivors benefits to women but did not give them to men
March 17
1862: (Birthday) Martha Platt Falconer, social work pioneer, born in Delaware, Ohio. Platt revolutionalized the treatment of deliquent girls by changing holding area of delinquent or homeless girls from virtual jails to homes for rehabilitation, education, and social adjustments. She pioneered her work at Sleighton Farm in Pennsylvania and the idea was gradually accepted throughout the nation.
March 16
1900: (Birthday) Eveline H. Burns, British-born American economist who helped design the U.S. Social Security system, born in London, England. Burns was a professor of economics at Columbia University, a member of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Committee of Economic Security and other “brain trust” boards, and openly criticized the American Medical Association for opposing Medicare.
1995: Mississippi ratified the 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the amendment that abolished slavery, almost 130 years after the fact.
March 15
1848: From documents of the Assembly of the State of New York. 71st session, vol. 5, document 129. Albany, 1848: “On March 15, 1848, four months prior to the first woman’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, forty-four women of Genesee and Wyoming County declared to the New York State Assembly that they owed no allegiance to the government since they were deprived of their political rights. Their petition states: `When women are allowed the privileges of rational and accountable beings, it will be soon be enough to expect from them the duties of such.’”
1901: (A First) Dita Hopkins Kinney appointed first superintendent of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps.
1933: (Birthday) Ruth Bader Ginsburg, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, born in Brooklyn, New York.
1937: (A First) The first contraceptive clinic is set up for poor women in North Carolina.
March 14
1961: Eleanor Roosevelt delivers a three-page list of women qualified for “top federal jobs.” President John Kennedy appoints less than a dozen.
1964: 38 residents of a Queens neighborhood failed to respond to the cries of Kitty Genovese as she was stabbed to death in the street outside their homes. The murderous attack could have been stopped and Genovese’s life saved had any of them called the police because the actual murder went on for a period of time. Many of the residents said they thought it was a domestic dispute and wouldn’t get involved.
March 12
1912: Juliette Gordon Low organizes the first troop, in Savannah, Georgia, of will be the Girl Scouts of America.
1925: Mary Belle Harris, prison reformer, is appointed superintendent of a Bureau of Prisons facility for women in Alderson, West Virginia.
March 11
1903: (A First) Der Wald is performed at the Metropolitan Opera. Written by Dame Ethel Mary Smyth, it is the first opera written by a woman to be performed in the US.
1907: (A First) a number of rich and famous women of the day including Mrs. John Jacob Astor, Maude Adams, Ethel Barrymore, Mrs. Walter Damrosch, and Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney opened their own women’s club The Colony with a clubhouse at 112 Madison Ave., New York City, the first time women had their own public gathering place.
1994: (A First) The first women priests ordained in the Church of England.
March 10
1913: (Death) Harriet Tubman, (date of birth unknown, probably in 1820) died in Auburn, NY, where she had made her home after the close of the Civil War. Born in slavery, she became the Moses of her people, leading more than 300 hundred slaves out of the South through the underground railway to Canada and freedom.
March 9
1892: Ida B. Wells Barnett, journalist and half owner of the Memphis Free Speech, denounces lynchings of three black men in Tennessee.
1906: Irene Miller, a member of the members of the Women’s Social and Political Union (and later, the Women’s Freedom League) was arrested for knocking at the home of the British Prime Minister and demanding a reply to her request to see the prime minister about women’s vote. During the arrest, Flora Drummond dodged inside the Prime Minister’s house and was also arrested. Annie Kenney was arrested outside for simply speaking to the crowd that had gathered.
1907: The first forced sterilization law in the United States is passed in Indiana. By 1944, 30 states with sterilization laws had reported a total of more than 40,000 eugenical sterilizations with those sterilized reported as insane or feebleminded. While 1907 - 1964 are considered by many to be the height of forced sterilizations, the numbers of women, predominantly Native American women and other poor women of color, sterilized after that period are even more astonishing.
Although Congress has been insistent that all family planning programs function purely on a voluntary basis there is uncontroverted evidence in the record that minors and other incompetents have been sterilized with federal funds and that an indefinite number of poor people have been improperly coerced into accepting a sterilization operation under the threat that various federally supported welfare benefits would be withdrawn unless they submitted to irreversible sterilization.
March 8
International Women’s Day
Artwork by Tina Coggins, TCDesign - Eye on Design
Today is International Women’s Day, first celebrated in the US in 1909 (following the declaration of the Socialist Party of America), and internationally in 1910. IWD is commemorated at the United Nations and is designated in many countries as a national holiday.
There is a long and inspirational history of International Women’s Day. To learn more about the history of this important day, check out The UN page on IWD, the United Nationals Cyber Schoolbus, and A History of International Women’s Day in words and images
1857: Women garment workers march in New York City to protest bad working conditions, low pay, and long days. The police attacked the protestors and dispersed them, but two years later, again in March, these women formed their first labour union to try and protect themselves and gain some basic rights in the workplace.
1908: Bread and Roses march in New York City.
1917: Bread and Peace strike staged in Russia:
It was in honor and recognition of these Russian women that International Women’s Day became officially recognized on March 8 (before that time, the day was celebrated on the last Sunday in February in the US, and on various days in March in Europe).
March 6
1906: (Birthday) Nora Stanton Blatch, the daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the pioneers of women’s rights in the US, herself a suffragist becomes the first member of the American Society of Civil Engineers.
1933: (A First) Eleanor Roosevelt hosts her first news conference for female reporters at the White House.
1937: (Birthday) Lt. Col Valentina Tereschkova born in Russia. Tereschkova orbited the earth 48 times aboard Vostok VI for almost three days (June 16 - 19, 1963). She manually controlled the space craft for part of the time. The first American woman allowed to touch a space craft’s controls was co-pilot Eileen Collins in February of 1995, thirty-two years later. The first American woman, Dr. Sally Ride, went into space as a crew member June 18, 1983, twenty years after Terschkova.
1971: (Birthday) Bean, feminist activist, editor of Expository Magazine, and co-blogger on Alas, A Blog, born in Cheektowaga, NY, outside of Buffalo.
March 5
1974: (A First) Helen Thomas, reporter for United Press International, was named UPI White House reporter, the first woman ever named to cover the presidential beat. She had been an award-winning reporter in Washington for 30 years before being allowed to cover the president. For many years women reporters, such as Lorena Hickok were only allowed to cover the wives of presidents.
1998: (A First) Lieutenant Colonel Eileen Marie Collins, U.S. Air Force, named first woman to command a space shuttle.
March 4
1917: (A First) Jeannette Rankin of Montana took her seat as the first woman elected to the House of Representatives. Montana women had the vote several years before the 1920 Federal amendment. She would serve only one term because as a pacifist she voted against the U.S. entry into World War I. Ironically she was sent back to Congress just in time to cast the dissenting vote for the U.S. entry into World War II after the Japanese attack on U.S. installations at Pearl Harbor.
1933: (A First) Frances Perkins assumes office of Secretary of Labor, the first woman to join a president’s cabinet.
1969: In a U.S. Supreme Court face-off, a woman attorney lifts a typewriter weighing more than 30 pounds that phone company secretaries were required to move by themselves.
That one single dramatic moment torpedoed the long held, inviolate strength prejudices against women who were thus barred from higher paying men-only jobs. Women were considered “too delicate and weak” to handle heavy weight or equipment.
The attorney then pointed out the phone company weight restriction for men before they were entitled to get help was only 25 pounds - five pounds less than a secretary who was paid considerably less was required to handle ALONE! The landmark case was Weeks v Southern Bell.
1982: (A First) Berthe Wilson is the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada.
1983: (A First) Montana became the first state to ban sex discriminatory rates in all insurance. Under the prevailing discriminatory rate structure women were paying up to 30% more for the *same* insurance coverage as men whether it was auto, health, disability, or old age income insurance even though actuary tables indicated women were less accident prone and lived longer.
March 3
1879: (A First) Belva Lockwood becomes the first female attorney admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court. (See also: On this day in women’s history, February 15)
1913: 5,000 suffragists parade up Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., the day before Woodrow Wilson’s innauguration.
Mounted on a white horse, Inez Millholland Boissevain led marchers down Pennsylvania Avenue from he Capitol almost to the White House, where, at the Treasury Building, women in costume performed allegorical tableaux. Suffragists came from all parts of the country. A group of women had left New York City on February 12 to walk to Washington to join the parade. Mary Church Terrell urged the participation of the Association of Colored Women, whose members protested attempts to segregate them in the march. African American journalist Ida B. Wells Barnett marched with the state contingent from Illinois. Nine bands, floats, and more than 5,000 marchers representing the states and occupations from homemakers to physicians, librarians, nurses, and farmers took the route where, the following day, the inaugural parade would accompany Woodrow Wilson, whose indifference to the issue of women’s suffrage Paul sought to dispel. In the presidential campaign, Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Part, the first to do so, had come out in favor of equal suffrage for women and men.
Rather than indifference, however, the suffrage parade encountered unruly, hostile onlookers, crowds that sought to disrupt the march and met no restraint from police. The unsympathetic mob behavior drew the attention of the press. News photographers, reporters, and cartoonists focused on the issue of women’s right to vote, and ultimately the attention was helpful to the suffrage cause.
1955: (A First) Clare Boothe Luce, former U.S. Senator and Congressional Representative becomes the first women in U.S. history to be named ambassador to a “major” country. A Republican and wife of Time, Inc., owner, she is appointed ambassador to Italy by Dwight Eisenhower. (See also: On this day in women’s history, February 19)
March 2
1873: (Birthday) Inez Leonore Haynes Gillmore Irwin, U.S. suffragist and feminist writer, born in Lowell, Massachusetts. She was co-founder with Maud Wood Park of the College Equal Suffrage League. Irwin was fiction editor of The Masses, and became a member of the Heterodoxy, and later Query, both women’s organizations whose members including most of the prominent artists, suffragists, and professional women of the era. She was a reporter during World War I in France. Her mother was a “mill girl” from the Lowell, Massachusetts factories.
1942: The U.S. Department of War strongly recommended Ford Motor Company hire up to 15,000 women workers at its Willow Run factory outside Detroit that had, at the time, only 28 female employees. It was seen as a means to aid the war economy rather than as a women’s rights measure. For many women, though, it became a step toward greater freedom and increased rights, and was, perhaps, one of the greatest precursors to the impending Second Wave of feminism.
One of the female Willow Run factory workers, Rose Will Monroe, came to personify the fictional “Rosie the Riveter” character when a government film crew came to the factory to film the workers.
March 1
1864: (Birthday) Rebecca Lee born. Lee received the first formal M. D. degree in the U.S. ever given a Afro-American woman. Lee got her degree 16 years after Elizabeth Blackwell fought her way into the all-male medical establishment. (See also: On this day in women’s history, January 23, for more information on Blackwell)
1890: (Birthday) Josephine Saxer Irwin , U.S. women’s rights activist and city official, born in Cleveland, Ohio.
She was instrumental in organizing Cleveland’s huge women’s suffrage parade in 1914 and she later became the first Clevelander to join the League of Women voters. JSI was also very active in the campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s.
From 1958-62, JSI served as councilman-at-large in the Cleveland suburb of Fairview Park, the first woman elected to the council in that city. (The author of WOAH lived in Fairview Park on Mastic Road while JSI was on the town council.)
1909: (A First) The University of Minnesota establishes the first university level school of nursing. Bertha Erdmann is named director.
1912: (A First) Isabella Goodwin becomes the first woman detective with the New York City police department.
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