On January 12, ...

... 1915, after debating the issue "from every point of view" for more than 10 hours, the U.S. House of Representatives, "by the overwhelming vote of 174-204," rejected a proposed constitutional amendment that would have given the vote to women throughout the country. It would be another 5 years before women secured that right in the 19th Amendment.
... 1998 (10 years ago today), at a meeting in Paris, 19 member states of the Council of Europe signed a ban on human cloning. Once ratified, the document, entitled the Additional Protocol to the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Dignity of the Human Being with regard to the Application of Biology and Medicine, on the Prohibition of Cloning Human Beings, was to become part of the Council of Europe's 1997 European Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine. (image credit)
... 1950, U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) was born in New York City.