On June 12

On this day in ...
... 1890 (120 years ago today), began, in Toronto, Canada, the 1st-ever convention of the Dominion Women's Enfranchisement Association. During the 2-day meeting, members of the association, whose forerunners included the Toronto Women's Literary Club founded in 1876, re-elected Dr. Emily Stowe (left), Canada's 1st woman physician, as President. Among those in attendance were suffragists like Susan B. Anthony (an IntLawGrrls foremother), Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, and Stowe's sister, Dr. Hannah Kimball.

(Prior June 12 posts are here, here, and here.)

On February 20

On this day in ...
... 1895, an hour after he left the meeting of a women's rights group led by May Wright Sewall, Susan B. Anthony, and Anna Howard Shaw, 77-year-old abolitionist and suffragist Frederick Douglass collapsed and died at his home in Washington, D.C. The New York Times obituary said of the man depicted below left in a Rochester, New York, statue of him and Anthony at tea:

It is a singular fact, in connection with the death of Mr. Douglass, that the very last hours of his life were given in attention to one of the principles to which he has devoted his energies since his escape from slavery. This morning he drove into Washington from his residence, about a mile out from Anacostia, a suburb just across the eastern branch of the Potomac, and at 10 o'clock appeared at Metzerott Hall, where the Women's National Council is holding its triennial. Mr. Douglass was a regularly-enrolled member of the National Women's Suffrage Association, and had always attended its conventions.

... 2005, María Teresa Fernández de la Vega (right), Spain's Vice President, announced that 76% of the electorate had voted for the Constitutional Treaty of the European Union in the 1st referendum on the charter. The treaty faltered in other countries, however, and its successor, the Lisbon Treaty, likewise remains unratified, as IntLawGrrls posted.

(Prior February 20 posts are here and here.)